Fury's message: War is bad

Rating: 3/10 (1 September 2018)

SET
starting off with the most positive aspect of the movie, the sets and set designs of the film are fantastic, from the prop design to the locations and sets used, this film really shines when it comes to the visual aspect.
EFFECTS
The effects are on the whole pretty good, except for the gunfire, which is pretty laughable, and looks like it came straight out of Star Wars and not World War Two.
CHARACTERS
There might as well not be any as we've seen them all before in every other war movie. Brad Pitt, John Bernthal and Michael Pena have proved themselves good actors in the past but no one brought their A-game to this movie, with Brad Pitt turning in one of the most mediocre performances of his career.
SCRIPT
The script ranges from average to boring. When a character re-tells a war story it usually tells us a bit about the character as well as providing context to their past experiences with war and how they feel about what they've done and how it has affected them and is affecting them now. In this movie this trope (because that's what it is by now) is used for no other purpose than making the audience and main character feel uncomfortable, and tells us pretty much nothing about the characters.
PACE
The pacing is all off, start stop start stop start stop, one minute we're watching a tank division bond in the battlefield the next we're sitting round a table with two characters who can't speak English (and might as well not be there) and talk to us about, what amounts to, a whole lot of nothing.
MUSIC
It sucks and is used in all the wrong places, musical cues are completely off and kill any tension scenes build up. Not to mention it's probably the most uninspired score i've ever heard.
RELATIONSHIPS
Oh look an American soldier who's mean.
Oh look an American soldier who's mean.
Oh look an American soldier who's mean.
I get it, war sucks but saving private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge, Apocalypse Now and We Were Soldiers are all war movies with likeable characters and probably pay better respect to the American military than this movie does (as a non-American I'm curious as to how Americans view this film's portrayal of their military).
Not to mention that this film possesses one of the most insulting sex scenes in film history, when Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS has more tasteful sex scenes than your movie, then you know you've made a mistake.

The first real female character to appear in the movie and she's little more than just something to be exploited, a more intelligent movie could have made this into a good point about how treats all men and women like objects but it's here just to create conflict within the platoon and no other reason. -

The main dynamic of our main crew is also laughable, "we bond through our masculinity", "we shout a lot", "we're mean but still human underneath".
It may have worked if Logan Lerman had more of an arc rather than it being split between Lerman and Pitt, Pitt's an established enough actor to take a backseat role, he's done it before, but I'm pretty sure he just wanted an Oscar. I like Brad Pitt but he should have been more of a supporting role.
PLOT
Was there one? If you want to make a Nihilistic movie fine, they've worked before but what was going on, they drove to a town, killed some Nazis, rinse and repeat.
There's also this ridiculous scene where 200-300 Germans are marching towards a broken down tank with 5 guys in it, and they decide to stay and fight, saying "I didn't run before".
WHY. Long Lerman has been in the war for about a day and now he's ready to fight and die with men that he barely knows despite never showing he held these values before.
Also - you pride yourself on killing Nazis, so you decide to throw your life away to kill some more knowing you're going to die, even though they could have run, so they let the Nazis kill them, and get a moral boost as they took down a tank. (Okay they slowed them down from attaining the town behind them but they didn't have any artillery with them, as it is clearly stated in the script) so the marching battalion was woefully unprepared to take a town in the first place.
HISTORY
"Settle down we hit a mine that's all" - so we'll just wander round like the people who set the mine aren't here despite the fact we established that we shoot corpses to make sure they're really dead - what? Who wrote this?
The history is hard to judge as inaccurate because the backdrop of the war is ignored, we're in a small part of Germany where the key points of the war are far away so it's hard to have a go at the film for accuracy.
I'm no military historian; so the props, dress and colloquialisms are beyond my judgement for historical accuracy but it distances itself from the key areas of the war enough so that it couldn't really be inaccurate.
The Germans are also dehumanised to the point where they might as well have been the Orcs or Uruk-hai from the Lord of the Rings, not all Germans were Nazis and we get it NAZIS WERE BAD, how about putting some humans in there among them.
USA
I like the USA, I have American friends, I like American movies and a lot of my favourite actors are American, but would it have hurt to show some other nations (you know Europeans, because that's where it takes place, who aren't the Germans to be mowed down).
I think it's safe to say we're all a bit sick of USA's World War Two shown in movies, but like I said its not a real problem and is a nit pick on my behalf.
EMOTION
I felt nothing when the characters died. And when Brad Pitt is "dying" he's sitting there like he's just got back from a long day of work and is gathering his engery back up, rather than facing his own mortality and reeling from being shot three times by a sniper.
Lerman's character also places his coat over Pitt's body and no one else's despite them all bonding, but Pen, Berthnal and LaBeuof aren't A-listers so their characters mean nothing.