Brutal tanks

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2019)

Tough, wounded men arguing with each other in a metal beast upon a scarred patch of earth. Their tank needs some electrical work before it will move again, and everyone's growing impatient with the increasing sense of danger around them. As we learn later, all four of these men have been fighting in that tank, named Fury, since the Allies first landed in Africa, but now it's 1945. The German war machine is broken but not gone, and Nazis are still trying to protect their homeland as America rolls across the German countryside towards Berlin.
I loved how this movie looked. Dirty, grungy, and smoke-filled, it looks like a dirtier Ridley Scott movie. There's one scene where one of the characters gets clean, and the event occurs in the middle of the tense central section where cleanliness ends up feeling wrong somehow. Everyone is always covered in dirt and blood. You can almost smell the weeks of sweat and mud and grease clinging to them.
The story is rather simple. The tank, having just lost its assistant driver, picks up a new guy to fill the post. He's been in the army for eight weeks while they've been in the war since Africa. They must go from town to town, engaging what little, but dangerous, German forces are left and ultimately defend a crossroads for the furtherance of the army as a whole. That simple story, though, is supported by a simple element. Its structure is centered around the new assistant driver, our eyes into this world. We are there as he goes from refusing to fire guns on possibly dead German bodies to mowing down lines of SS marching towards the tank. The execution on the journey (some might call it a character arc) is so well executed, and I knew it within the movie's first 20 minutes.
At the center of that journey (the exact center of the movie, actually) is the scene where Brad Pitt's character cleans up. The tank has advanced into a German town, wiping out the handful of German soldiers and our main character has joined Pitt by invading a small apartment that houses a middle aged woman and her teenaged cousin. The entire point of the movie is to watch humanity strip away as people wade through war, and seeing these two women cower in fear at these two American soldiers creates a sense of unease and unpredictability. But the scene flows from one emotion to another. Tension gives to innocent love and breaks down into sheer terror. It's a fantastic little journey, as claustrophobic as life in the tank.
Outside of that, though, are a handful of action scenes that are completely convincing in their brutality. The standout, of course, is the final battle at the crossroads. Heavily inspired by Audie Murphy's heroic action that bears some similarity to the action on screen, the battle is an extended descent into Hell as battle surrounds a broken down tank housing our heroes.
Oh, David Ayer...what happened to you? Immediately after this you gave us Suicide Squad. What happened to the efficient and focused storyteller? I would blame Warner Brothers, but then Ayers gave us Bright.