You likely already have a strong opinion about Fury, and you’ll likely find this review disappointing because I agree with you, except for how I don’t. Writer/Director David Ayer deserves praise for this film as well as almost all the criticism it has received. This is an ambitious and thoughtful movie with a rote ending that gives easy answers to the difficult questions it raises. It has exciting and engaging combat sequences that are often tremendously authentic—until they aren’t. It evokes the sense of brotherhood in combat as well as any war movie I’ve seen but also lets a new recruit enter into this brotherhood almost instantly after a perversely brutal indoctrination period.

I am justly ambivalent about this movie because it is sometimes great and sometimes terrible, but I enjoyed it more when I re-watched it already resigned to its flaws. It finally works better as a gritty action movie than an exploration of what war does to the people involved or an exploration of anything except cool action sequences.

The movie starts very strong as Ayer shows us the inside of a Sherman tank and the crew members. The look of the cramped interior of the tank and the battered and exhausted men have a tremendous and evocative authenticity. Their interrelations  might be called camaraderie but better still like family, with the tank’s commander, Wardaddy (Brad Pitt, Inglorious Basterds), being the domineering father. They are like a family in the touching, unhealthy and annoying ways people can be in a family. In another early scene their casual conversation that addresses the fate of the souls of dead Germans and who exactly would fuck who for a chocolate bar, and their childish teasing of each other evokes the nature of the relationships people who have faced significant hardship together have, and they ring entirely true.

Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal as the veteran tank crew members all give strong performances; they seem to understand their characters and certainly commit to their performances, and Ayers deserves praise for creating characters that seem to have real depth and motivations.

But the movie also has the bookish new recruit who is naïve to the brutality of war and needs to be indoctrinated to become an effective warrior. Norman (Logan Lerman) is more than a little bit like Upham in Saving Private Ryan and more than a little bit like any other sensitive recruit (Zac Orth in When Trumpets Fade is my favorite sensitive recruit).

But his initial icy reception from the other members is authentic—he is belittled and ignored and lectured to by people who treat him as an outsider and a potential source of cigarettes.This is also a scene where the supporting cast, particularly LeBouf, is strong–as they are throughout the film.  LaBeouf stands out in this scene as he delivers the pivotal and perhaps best lines of the movie: “Wait until you see . . . what a man can do to another man.”

And we certainly do see. There are lushly gorgeous shots of corpses being bulldozed and then hauled away in trucks. Germans hang civilians for public display; Americans summarily execute Germans for hanging people for public display. Tanks’ tracks crush corpses already embedded in deep mud. The wounds sustained in combat are brutally realistic, unless Brad Pitt’s character sustains them, of course.

And this movie constantly does this—here’s something interesting or provocative or authentic that is then diffused, or something stereotypical is problematized in an interesting way or there is something real that will swerve to unreality in a very melodramatic way.

Pitt is asked to do an awful lot, and he doesn’t make any missteps. He’s asked to be loving, hateful, sophisticated, sensitive and cruel. It’s nearly impossible to avoid comparing him to Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) in Saving Private Ryan as he leads men he has led since North Africa and sneaks away to have a small private breakdown after one of them is killed in combat. Of course, his struggle to retain his humanity (one he, like Captain Miller, is losing) is forgotten in the final glorious battle where he claims the tank is his home or some such nonsense.

His carrying a captured German Sturmgewehr 44 and a 1917 revolver with sweetheart grips is a bit of an affectation—can’t he just have one quirky firearm?

Too much?

There’s a stereotypical green lieutenant, who gets mocked by the veteran sergeants in a predictable way, but the lieutenant’s fate is not stereotypical because this movie is never completely good or bad.

There’s certainly no way to identify which one is the Green Lieutenant here.

The most problematic scene in the movie—actually the second or third most problematic scene—is when Wardaddy and Norman are in an apartment with two women, and Wardaddy has presented them with more than the already established cost in food and cigarettes for sex. The tension in this scene is palpable as the women don’t know if they will be raped or killed.

Instead Wardaddy has them make a meal as a sort simulacrum of normal life that he wants to be charming and idyllic, and he uses bribery and the threat of violence to maintain it. He then practically orders Norman to have sex with the younger of the two as part of his “let’s make a man out of Norman” project.

Ayer ducks what is in effect a rape scene by having the woman positively bat her eyes at Norman and make the first move, suggesting this somehow isn’t a situation where the woman has no chance to refuse “consent.” Wardaddy allays the older woman’s concerns saying, “They’re young and they’re alive,” suggesting this is a positive life-affirming act for both.

So many war movies ignore or trivialize or romanticize the plight of women in these situations that this movie gets credit for showing it as tense and dangerous and then loses all of this credit by suggesting these two crazy kids fell in love by playing the piano together for ten minutes. Some will find this scene offensive and off putting–either for its realism or lack of realism, or both.

Of course, this is after Wardaddy forces Norman to commit a war crime, sort of, as part of a character-building exercise. They are all teachable moments. Wardaddy tells him he’s trying to teach him a lesson because he has to learn how to kill Nazis because they’re in the killing Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’—sorry, wrong Brad Pitt World War II movie.

This is after an assault on German anti-tank positions that is interesting and exciting, and you can find people on the Internet who’ll tell you why it’s almost all wrong. You can find many things on the Internet these days. Here’s an article where a tank veteran praises the movie, except for the ending. Here another veteran also has positive things to say. I include these because they came up from an Internet search where I was looking for people complaining about the movie, and it feels disingenuous to omit them.

Regardless of their flaws, all the action scenes are tremendously well done, not necessarily realistic but exciting and clear with good sound editing and effects. Things blow up real good. Pitt’s radio chatter seem real while also helping the audience understand what’s going on. Many criticize the movie’s machine guns for having an inordinate number of tracers, but these tracers also help the audience understand who’s shooting who, and they look cool. And Ayer constantly negotiates between these criteria, settling on clear battle scenes that are entertaining, look really cool and are at times authentic.

You’re supposed to shoot the lead tank first, particularly if it also has the biggest gun; however, sound doctrine also suggests not killing your star at the beginning of an action sequence in the middle of the movie.

It is not difficult to find complaints about the movie’s centerpiece battle of four Shermans against one Tiger tank, featuring the only remaining working Tiger. The Service on Celluloid podcast has an episode going over it in detail–while also often praising it, specifically the sound design. The Shermans and the Tiger make tactical mistakes; the tanks commanders expose themselves to enemy fire; the tanks get unrealistically close to each other and blah, blah, blah. This sequence is exciting; it’s one of the most exciting action sequences I’ve ever seen. I find myself holding my breath when I watch it.

Super-cool tanks battling on an open field.

The movie also depicts the child soldiers the Germans were using towards the end of the war somewhat more authentically than The Big Red One (where Lee Marvin apparently spanks the Nazi out of a child sniper), The Bridge at Remagen (where the child is out of uniform–and there’s only one) or in some ways even Die Brucke, where young-looking but pretty tall adults play the children. And I can’t say anything bad about how they’re depicted here except the glorious final stand isn’t against children; it is against highly motivated crack troops, not old men or children—but these crack troops can’t seem to find their Panzerfausts until the narrative requires it—the ones we see them carrying in earlier shots.

Every time I want to admire this film, something happens to undercut it, but trying to blithely dismiss this film as a Saving Private Ryan wannabe in a tank is unfair–except for how it is kind of a Saving Private Ryan wannabe in a tank. But even then, it tries to reach farther and speak more meaningfully about the dehumanizing experience and the horror of war, but finally doesn’t—or it gives answers just as pat as any other and the same futile, helpless and valiant last stand—except this one is more futile and less realistic than many. There is so much really bad and really good about this movie anyone who completely loves it or completely hates it is missing something.

And I could say more about the last stand and the big speech. I like my initial note about the ending: “Please. Does the music swell for you too, Spartacus?” If this movie ended with our heroes saying, “That’s too many Germans, let’s retreat” or “That’s a lot of Germans—let’s call in an air strike,” it could be among the best World War II movies, but it doesn’t—the tank becomes their own little private Alamo, while not really saving anything. Everyone knows the Germans are beaten—the movie looks at what happens to people when they fight but doesn’t tell us why, and the ending makes the why part even fuzzier.

This ending shouldn’t bother me because it is entirely predictable, but it does because this is a movie that aspires to much more than being entirely predictable but instead settles on being entertaining–and it is; it’s an excellent R-rated Hollywood action movie; it just isn’t much more than that.

Recommendation

You do worse things than buying Fury. You might be able to find a steelbook version, which would obviously be better. You might also enjoy a collection of Sgt. Fury comics. Fury of Dracula is an excellent hidden movement board game, but it’s out of print, so wait for a new print run.

You can see the Tiger and the tank that played Fury at the Bovington Tank Museum. They also have a pretty cool YouTube channel, if tanks are your kind of thing. Here’s a video of YouTube Influencer Lindybeige riding the Fury tank at the museum.