'History is violent' - You will feel like you have lived in a tank after this movie...

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2014)

Its April 1945, the war is almost over in Europe and the Allies are pushing into Germany. No one wants to die in the last few weeks of the war and such is the challenge facing the crew of the Sherman Firefly 'Fury' - When their assistant driver is killed, newcomer Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman, an actor clearly with a long career ahead of him) is assigned to a tank crew in what almost seems like a clerical error. His crew are veterans since Africa and unsympathetic to his nerves and fears. As the unit pushes into Germany to relieve various stranded units and capture a town he is forced into a baptism of fire he will not easily forget.
I went to see this film with my wife (Who hates war movies normally and I kind of tricked her into going) and a make up artist friend of mine and all three of us enjoyed it for different reasons. So hats off to the Director because my wife rarely enjoys a war movie, but she felt the film was good because it concentrated on the intimate relationship between the five men that is formed in such a small space and that is the focus of the movie.
It has many similarities to the movie 'Lebanon' (A film set inside and told entirely from the perspective of a crew of a tank in the Middle East) in many respects - and although this film isn't quite totally tank interior POV as that one was it captures the grime, the sweat and the oil of the confined space perfectly.
Writer / Director David Ayer has managed to present us with a environment that we have rarely seen before in a World War 2 movie. Despite the very English countryside being a bit of a giveaway to some of the location shooting, the Production Design here is top notch and for those into their history there is much to enjoy, not least of which is that this is the only movie in history to feature an original working Tiger tank, care of Bovington tank Museum.
The acting by the five leads is solid with Jon Berthanl being especially unpleasant as the tanks gunner. Say what you like about Shia LeBeouf being an oddball, but he clearly can act and that is all I care about when I go to see him on the screen, Micheal Pena and Brad Pitt come over as the Mother and the Father of the group, with Pitt's pragmatic Commander teaching some lessons to their latest recruit with brutal reality. He doesn't want his men to die, and therein at least lies the one fault in the movie.
Given a mission by local Commander (Jason Issacs rolling off his American Army Commander accent with ease) they find themselves alone having to defend a vital crossroads. Aware that the enemy are coming and may charge head long into a company of cooks and clerks down the road we're told they're all that is left to get in the way, but this doesn't really ring true. Its April 1945 and the Allies were superior everywhere and after the Battle of the Bulge Cooks and Clerks were well aware that occasionally they might have to pick up their rifles and could have done so here. But Brad Pitt's Don 'Wardaddy' Collier growls he is going to 'stay' and the rest of his men decide to remain, even though earlier he was very clear he wanted his men to survive the war. This was perhaps the only bit of the film that wasn't entirely convincing, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the movie though the battle at the end began to border on the unrealistic after a Germans began missing a tank with Panzerfausts from a range of a few feet.
All in all this is a good solid film which is hard to fault. It presents a realistic depiction of war and shows things as they were. One scene where the G.I's capture a town and what can only be described as a consensual rape effectively happens will leave many people feeling uncomfortable but that is the reality of Germany in 1945, women weren't just raped by the Russians, but the Western Allied soldiers too, even if some of them were a little more polite about it. We might not like to talk about it, but it happened - In victory in war men do not always behave like gentleman and even the greenest of recruits can soon become a harden killer.
My wife said she enjoyed the movie because she felt as though she had experienced and lived in a tank after seeing it on the big screen (we saw it on an Imax) and yes, while the final confrontation was more for entertainment than for accuracy, this is a film I urge you to see none the less.