"A" for effort, but execution too sloppy.

Rating: 6/10 (18 August 2016)

The cast is clearly committed. The special/practical effects, props, and battle reenactments are convincing. The historical details seem well-researched. The production values are very high.
And here's an action/drama that isn't a superhero franchise or any kind of existing property - you really want it to succeed.
So it's all the more annoying that it doesn't quite come together.
I'm OK with the clichÃ©-ridden story. The story arc basically works. It gets us what we want to see. It's in the smaller, technical details - and at the thematic core - where things falls apart.
1. The editing and cinematography feels off. For example, the movie opens with a sweeping Laurence of Arabia horseback entrance which doesn't fit the European rural setting. Little things, but almost the whole film is like this: wrong composition, wrong music cue, poor choice of edits and shots.
2. The filmmakers flinch. So it's clear we are going to be shown the "hard realities" of the closing months of WWII in Europe. German women selling themselves for a packet of cigarettes or some fresh eggs... yet the movie bends the story into contrived knots to avoid giving the crew of the Fury in any really hard moral choices to agonize over. Any Germans they have to kill in cold blood are conveniently SS (or accused of "murdering" US soldiers.. huh?). The German women they have sex with are willing and grateful for the experience.
3. *Spoiler* Look, as many others point out: you explode two grenades inside a tank with 4 bodies inside, I think anyone can fairly extrapolate what the interior decor might look like afterwards. Instead, we are shown it's like nothing happened. The incredulity of that late scene just totally dropped me out of the movie. I get the feeling that the final battle scene was reedited and significantly reworked - studios demanding more action or something along those lines. It feels very sloppy, with many continuity errors and none of the historical fidelity visible in earlier sequences.
4. It was well-acted, Pitt especially, Logan Lerman (who played Norman) also, but I never bought into the other characters as anything more than a collection of random (if historically accurate) personality ticks. Again, maybe the choppy editing is at fault here - but there isn't enough interplay to get to know them well enough to care about - or even empathize - with them. Which brings us to the biggest fault,
5. Why are we supposed to be watching this movie again? There are a bunch of themes or dramatic arcs, but what, if anything, the filmmakers want to say about them remains pretty much a mystery. So it ends up being a movie with some cool reenactments of WWII tank battles ... and not a whole lot more.