Hauntingly bleak, relentlessly brutal, and evocative of gratuitous violence which in turn provokes psychological disturbance, director David Ayer’s WWII epic “Fury” is a well-acted, suitably raw depiction of the horrors of war that offers visceral battle scenes but doesnt quite live up to its larger ambitions. Full of gruesome flesh-splatter and largely realistic action which is riveting from start to finish, this film attempts to take its audience not simply into the depth of fallen humanity amidst explosions and villages reduced to rubble, but more importantly into the shadowy recesses of a man and his crew while they fight to survive a truly terrible conflict. Starting at the beginning and then gradually making his way throughout the rest of the narrative, director Ayer more or less clearly makes an artistic point of showing what it is he’s trying to say in the film: open with War Daddy alongside his grimy, exhausted and war-weary soldiers as they crack insensitive jokes about Adolf Hitler while a column of battered tanks make their way across the German countryside. Fast-forward, then, a little ways further – out of the corner of his eye, Norman, the young recruit whom the more emotional facets of the story revolve around, spies a teenager in the woods, but he hesitates to alert his superiors, or to target the teen and pull a trigger himself. Within seconds, the quiet scene erupts into chaos. The tank ahead of our amateur spotter is hit with a makeshift Molotov cocktail, thrown by the enemy, the teenager in the trees. An American soldier takes a direct hit and bursts into flames before consequentially blowing his own brains out so as to avoid further suffering; rather than allowing the fire to consume him slowly, this soldier removes his service pistol, points it at his own head, and pulls the trigger. “War is hell”, that’s what David Ayer is trying to say, and for the most part he says it. Despite that sentiment, though, his film “Fury” might be worse. “Fury” is set during the last month of the Atlantic theatre of war during World War II in April of 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theater, a battle-hardened U.S. Army sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division named Don “War Daddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) commands a M4A3E8 Sherman tank, named “Fury”, along with its five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Collier’s composure under horrific conditions has earned him the loyalty and respect of the three beleaguered American soldiers who make up his unit: Boyd (Shia LaBeouf) is a religious man who wants to know if his fellows in arms have been “saved”; Grady (Jon Bernthal) is a sadistic bully who lets the insanity of combat excuse some of his despicable behaviors; and Gordo (Michael Pena) is a Hispanic racial stereotype who, sadly, isn’t given much time to develop in between missions. The movie pivots when fresh-faced Norman (Logan Lerman) is assigned to their tank as an assistant driver…despite the fact that he was previously just a clerk with no experience manning a tank whatsoever. Outnumbered and outgunned, War Daddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany. From there, we wonder if “Fury” will be about the gradual corruption of Norman’s untarnished soul, or if it will cry out with a justification of Collier’s harsh tactics in a time of war-related crisis. The answer is the former, with a healthy dose of the latter. “Fury” loosely structures itself as a rescue mission, but it’s more interested in analyzing the impact war has on the men asked to murder in the name of God and country. These men are damaged beyond repair at the onset of the story, and the point of “Fury” seems to be that given how war is Hell, no matter how hard they fight, there is no salvation waiting at the end of the tour. You only “win” when you resign yourself to this sad reality. In other words, “Fury” is a nihilistic manifesto used by Hollywood to give justification toward humanity’s immoral treatment of each other on both sides during the war. For this reason, I can’t say that I enjoyed Ayer’s “Fury” because ‘enjoy’ just wouldn’t be the proper word. I don’t enjoy seeing what war can do to people, whether they’re the aggressor or the innocent victims. I don’t enjoy seeing people suffer in the many ways that they do and always have in battle, being blown to bits or cut down with bullets, regardless of whether or not Hollywood exaggerates it all; that is to say, I don’t enjoy the knowledge of the fact that the gravity to which man’s violence against fellow men can accelerate is unnervingly high. “Fury” is a film which almost too accurately captures this motif, and it’s for that reason that the film itself is far too cruel, impatient, heartless, grueling and cynical to ever embrace, let alone recommend to others. And yet, at the same time, I do begrudgingly admire the director’s intense commitment to the miseries of combat which follow the atrocities of war. Having never served in the military, I can only assume that the stench of death and despair which chokes “Fury” pulls directly from the charred memories of armed service veterans. But realism – particularly the painstaking recreation of the devastating war-time scenarios – doesn’t amount to a hopeful or spiritually stable experience in the theater. On the brighter side, “Fury” offers one of the more technologically realistic depictions of the operating mechanics inside and outside a tank. When it comes to the intense image of tanks using their gargantuan guns to blow eachother up or even something much more subtle like the camera following along while it focuses on the physical movement of the vehicle’s links with the road wheels in conjunction with the suspension bogies and the drive sprockets as they make trails across mud and grass, either way, technically speaking “Fury” is a work of innovative art. It’s a film which adopts the very same intensity, brutality and futility of either Stone’s “Platoon” or especially Spielberg’s equally deplorably propagandish but atmospherically sound “Saving Private Ryan.” Tanks are cinematic challenges, and the graceful obstacle with which director Ayer maneuvers them around battlefields always kept me invested in “Fury”, making it positively one of the most technologically convincing war films ever made, despite whatever minor usage there might’ve been with CGI. However, despite its breathtaking technical precision, “Fury” suffers from five specific flaws, and these are what they are: First – excluding Boyd (LaBeouf) and Norman (Lerman) – the remaining characters in War Daddy’s (Pitt) unit are totally unlikeable. There actually comes a point (though, maybe its just me) where you actually begin rooting for the Nazis to pick them off one by one until they’re all dead. Bernthal’s Grady is just a foul-mouthed and perverted asshole who likes to pick on and intimidate Norman for no apparent reason other than his misplaced naiveté, Peña’s Gordo is a sullen and sarcastic prick who dwells too much on the darker side of everything, and even Pitt portrays a man who is remarkably cold and emotionally abusive; War Daddy is so embittered and staunchly desensitized to everything, he at one point tells Norman – who retains innocence for the most part – to shoot and kill German women and children regardless of whether or not they’re innocent; to Pitt’s War Daddy, all Germans are bad. Which then leads us to the second flaw: “Fury” falls in with the flashy and sensationalized war films of the ‘40s-‘60s in its erroneous implication that somehow all Germans were Nazis; they weren’t. NOT EVERY GERMAN IN GERMANY AT THE TIME OF WWII WAS A NAZI. Many of the soldiers who seemingly fought for Hitler against the Allies and the Soviets were in reality actually fighting for the protection of their families and their country and NOT for the Nazi party. They couldn’t have cared less about Hitler or the SS, they were merely fighting out of a deep-rooted sense of patriotism, the same as we did, in spirit anyway. Hollywood wants everyone to forget the fact that many of the Germans who made up their country’s army joined into the military tradition before Hitler even came into power, before Nazism came about, and “Fury” is a perfect example of how political correctness tries to censor historical truth; one instance of this is when War Daddy forces Norman to shoot at point-blank and in cold blood a random German P.O.W who is wearing an American G.I.’s jacket. The German pleads with Pitt not to kill him, even showing everyone pictures of his wife and children, but War Daddy just slaps the pictures out of his hand and forces him down to his knees. War Daddy’s reasoning: the “Kraut” must’ve gotten the jacket off of an American he probably killed somewhere (although in the film no one really knows how or under what circumstances the German actually got the jacket), therefore stealing the jacket and wearing it somehow makes him deserve an automatic death sentence. There is a moment toward the end where a young SS soldier sees Norman hiding underneath the tank but decides not to say anything, thereby sparing him, and in a way that one moment sort of redeems the political propaganda that is “Fury”; but it sadly isn’t enough. Thirdly, the film opens with a statement of the fact that Germany had superior equipment during WWII, but this statement is immediately contradicted when the film consistently depicts the Germans as ridiculously lousy shots in almost every action scene. What would’ve been the point of having all that superior firepower if they were just wasting all of it? If this were true, Germany would’ve lost the war in the first six months. But again, all of it is exaggerated hype with little historical accuracy. Fourthly, all throughout “Fury”, people are being blown to bits, chopped up, decapitated and torn in half with gunfire, but Brad Pitt is so “macho” that he only gets four clean shots to the chest and at the same time somehow manages to have a chummy heart-to-heart with Norman before dying? And even then, it finally takes a couple of Nazis to thrown in some hand-grenades in order to actually kill him? How is that possible? Lastly, during the climax, a swarm of SS Nazi soldiers charge at War Daddy and his men while they hide inside their tank. The entire time during their charge, the Germans approach purely from in front of the tank and in clear aim of its cannon and its line of fire, never from the back, when in reality the Germans would’ve first taken appropriate cover at various points around the entirety of the vehicle and then would’ve taken a more strategic tactic as opposed to just charging at it. They never would’ve just ran toward the tank to begin with, and they certainly would’ve never approached only from the front, let alone willingly put themselves directly in front of its gun. The Germans just weren’t that stupid, despite what Hollywood wants us to think. Here again, “Fury” is a perfect example of propaganda: Americans are the “smart heroes”, the Germans – Nazi or not, mind you – are the “brainlessly villainous buffoons.” Am I a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t expect at some point to see a war film that isn’t overtly biased. That’s why “Black Hawk Down” is the greatest war film ever made: it provides the facts, however dramatized for thematic effect, as they happened for the most part, without any dollar-making political agenda behind it. Outside of war aficionados, I don’t see “Fury” as being something that is appealing to a larger, mainstream audience – even with the grimacing Brad Pitt at the forefront of the marketing campaign. Pitt has been known to dwell in dark territories over the course of his career, and “Fury” earns its stripes as a brutal death march through grim, war-savaged territories. But it never even attempts to shake that inherent attitude of dejection and discouragement that comes with being an integral cog in a besieged war effort. Although it offers striking realism in terms of technical effects and thematic enthrallment, in the end “Fury” won’t be providing coherent audience members with a satisfying pay-off; instead, it will have ticket buyers who are strapping in to endure the harsh, bitter realities of the war effort. https://youtube/watch?v=FLiamMVgoxc
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 19:56:11 +0000
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