"Stop talking' about yesterday's fight. Start talking' about today's".

Rating: 8/10 (26 October 2014)

"Fury" is being heralded as the current/next great war movie but I think time will tone the rhetoric down. It doesn't have the epic sweep of "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", and when you come right down to it, it's not even about the second World War so much as an intense look at an American tank crew that views their job as 'the best one they ever had'. All quite facetious of course because war is hell, and scenes in the movie are intended to convey that fact.
Overall it's a fine movie with exceptional performances by Brad Pitt and Logan Lerman as the new member of the Fury crew who learns the facts of war life real quick while under fire when hesitation can mean certain death. The understated message of the film is announced by Pitt's 'Wardaddy' character - "Ideals are peaceful. History is violent". With that as a reference point, I don't quite know what to make of the unplanned rendezvous with the German cousins. It seems to me you had three types of Germans during the War, those who were Nazis, those who supported them, and those who had to bide their time and not openly defy them as a guarantee of survival. Would a young German girl have been able to share a romantic interlude with an American soldier given the intense propaganda prevalent in Nazi Germany? Not impossible perhaps, but what are the odds?
I guess the idea that was meant to be conveyed was best illustrated with the character of Private Ellison (Logan Lerman). Coming in cold, the newly assigned soldier encountered practically every conceivable emotion and situation that one might experience in an entire deployment, but in a span of only a couple of days. The idea was expressed at one point by a soldier who stated that the eyes take it all in but the mind is unable to process all the death, destruction and inhumanity of war and make any sense of it. Presumably because there is no sense to it, it's men following orders with a mission to defend their country.
The final battle? Well it's a movie after all. My instinct tells me that five soldiers in a tank aren't going to be able to wipe out an entire German squadron with a kill ratio of twenty to one, even if that's the way it appears on film. The German soldier giving a bye to Private Ellison - it's not unheard of, but comes across here as just a little too unrealistic. I guess each viewer will have to be their own judge with "Fury", maybe more so than with most war films.