Fury dives straight down into the visceral savagery of war

Rating: 8/10 (3 November 2014)

It's World War Two and April of 1945. While the Americans, British, and French cross the Rhine and slash their way through into the heart of Germany, the Russian Soviets have smashed through Eastern Germany and are breaching Berlin. Nazi Germany is teetering on its last legs.
As the American Army advances, they encounter brutal resistance every step of the way. They have to work their way from village to village, cleaning out the tattered remnants of the Wehrmacht (the German Army) that now consists chiefly of teens and even children. Villages are left in rubble, both from the retreating Germans and the entering Allied forces. Hitler's fanatical command from the Führerbunker in Berlin is for every German to fight to the last man, woman, child. The Nazi motto emblazoned on signs and banners pushes this message home: Ein Volk Ein Reich Ein Führer. And for any German that dares show signs of weakening, the SS will torture and hang them.
The movie focuses on an Army tank crew that has been together since the Allied invasion of North Africa (1942) and the crew has suffered its first casualty. Their turret gunner. The crew commander, Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt), aka Wardaddy, is a man forged by three years of relentless war. He's kept his crew together and in one piece by adopting one maxim: kill or be killed. He carries it down to every enemy man, woman, and child he encounters, and to him every German is the enemy. Ironically, he speaks fluent German. And he's been killing them since his North African days.
He's been assigned a new turret gunner, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a raw young recruit trained by the Army to type. "Sixty words a minute," as he claims. Wardaddy knows he has to shape this kid up or things aren't going to work out and he'll be a liability for the crew. The acid test is when Wardaddy grabs a German prisoner caught wearing an American Army trench coat (presumably an infiltrator) and forces Norman to shoot him point blank in the back. Soon Norman is killing Germans and liking it.
The tank squad consisting originally of five tanks with infantry is sent out on several missions, dreading they might run into a Tiger. Their tank is the American Army Sherman, a medium-sized tank but no match for the far better armored German Tiger tank. They liberate a German village and shoot the local SS officer as the one responsible for all the hanging bodies they passed.
This is an outstanding war movie and I've seen quite a few. But it is intense and adrenaline-loaded from its very start to the final end. There is death and dying in almost every scene. But this is war and war is hell. Or as Wardaddy explains to Norman, "Ideals are peaceful; history is violent." "The war will be over soon," he says, "but before it's over, more people will die." Even the scene when Wardaddy and Norman invade the apartment of a German woman (Anamaria Marinca) and her young cousin, Emma (Alicia von Rittberg), the tension is palpable and hovers in the air like the angel of death. Norman is captivated by the young Emma and soon they're swooning over each other. They enter the bedroom together. The tension escalates when the three other crew members show up, but Wardaddy knows how to handle his crew and keeps things in line. As they've leaving the village, shells shriek down from the sky and blow the building with the German woman and Emma in it to smithereens. Norman rushes over and sees the broken dead body of Emma lying in the rubble. But this is war and war is hell, and more people will die before it's over.
Eventually the tanks (reduced to three) set out to hold a crossroads open. They run into a German Tiger, and only Wardaddy's Sherman tank Fury (crudely painted on its cannon barrel) survives the ordeal, defeating the almost invincible Tiger. Reaching the crossroads, their tank hits a land mine that blows apart one of its treads and ruins a road wheel, rendering it motionless. But they've been ordered to defend the crossroads. A determined infantry battalion of about three hundred seasoned Waffen SS approach, and Wardaddy tells his crew they can leave if they want but he's staying. As he says of his tank, Fury, "This is my home." Out of sheer loyalty to their warchief they all stay. One crew member survives the carnage.
The action is realistic to a tee. The acting is good although I found Pitt a bit wooden in a few places. I loved the music. The score was very good but enhanced the movie and did not interfere. I thought the flash photos at the very end were great.
But we learn scarcely nothing about any of the crew members. It's like they had no life before the war. Except for Norman, all the men seem in their thirties, but there's no mention of wives, girl friends, children, what they did before the war. All we really know even of Wardaddy is he speaks fluent German and knows his Bible well as he recites a line from Isaiah before he dies. Their sole existence seems to be entirely consumed as crew members of a tank in wartime and their private lives are a total blank, which I found very strange. For this reason I give it only 8 out of 10.
World War Two ended Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But it did not end war. Is war endemic to the human species? After five millennia of civilization, one might hope that humans could find a more equitable and rational way to settle their differences. But as Wardaddy said, "Ideals are peaceful; history is violent." If violence is built into human nature, we'd better find a better way to channel it.