Movies set in confined spaces — submarines, rocket capsules, and in this case, tanks — must necessarily define that space and use it visually to enhance their stories. The greater detail they can provide, the more the audience can identify with the people confined, and appreciate their perspectives. Das Boot (1982) is a masterful example of how to use the confining parameter to great effect. Fury does a nice job of presenting its tank interior with a minimum of definition. It could have been more definitive, to my way of thinking, but it suffices.
David Ayer’s Fury sports an eponymous title (for the tank itself), and a figurative one, for it is anger against the enemy that drives these World War II soldiers to destroy so devastatingly. The tank crew (Shia LeBeouf, Michael Péna, Jon Bernthal and newbie Logan Lerman) are led by Brad Pitt, who has survived a couple of years of tank combat because he is smart, ruthless and very good at killing Nazis. He will, however, be sorely tested at a crossroad somewhere in Germany . . .
Ayer’s film works as a portrait of what tank fighters did, and had to endure, fighting in the name of freedom seventy years ago. But it isn’t intended as a history lesson so much as a polemic regarding inhumanity. The most successful soldiers, the ones who survive, are those who refuse to acknowledge the enemy as people like themselves. They kill and destroy just as harshly as they can, before the same can be applied to them.
A lengthy middle section of the plot, when the crew sits down to table with a couple of pretty German girls, illustrates how war can dehumanize supposedly civilized men into being ready to rape and pillage indiscriminately and without conscience. Only the discipline of Pitt’s leadership prevents chaos, because in chaos the soldiers can and will do anything to anyone to provide themselves a little comfort. This segment of the film is effective, but it’s also mighty uncomfortable — and it’s meant to be.
The film ends with a lengthy battle scene which questions the nature of heroism. Here, it is simply bad fortune and stubbornness that forces Pitt and his crew to make a stand against overwhelming numbers. There is a beauty about the battle, amongst the explosions and the blood and the tracers and the strategy and the selflessness and the fury, but it is a terrible beauty which is best seen on screen rather than experienced. There are no winners in war; only people who survive it and spend the rest of their lives trying to forget it. ☆ ☆ ☆. 29 October 2014.