Review of WWII movie: Fury

Fury is the name of the new movie by David Ayar, which takes place in April 1945 in Nazi Germany at the very end of the second world war.

The film begins when a man on a horse appears from out of the fog in a barren, mucky area that obviously has recently encountered a vast number of vehicles, men and bombs.  As the man looks around calmly and his image becomes clearer, we see that he is a German officer.  Out of nowhere, a figure suddenly appears, pushes the man from his horse and stabs him in the face.  The killer is Sergeant Don Collier, known as Wardaddy, whose character is played by Brad Pitt.  Collier is the commander of a Sherman tank named Fury, and leads a crew of four in a final attack on Berlin.  The tank is shown in the background in nearly every scene throughout this raw movie, which doesn’t bother with anything resembling Hollywood flair.  It is a bloody, raw, no-holds-barred type of film jam packed with violence and death, much in the same way as The Big Red Once by Samuel Fuller in 1980 and Cross of Iron by Sam Peckinpah in 1977.

Pitt’s character is much more like the one he played in The Tree of Life, and is quite unlike the role he played in Inglourious Basterds, even though he plays a military man with subordinates in both films.  Ayer, who previously directed Training Day, Street Kings, and End of Watch, studies the behavior and environment of men who kill, and his prior movies reflect this.  Fury is no different – it is about killing as opposed to murdering, and centers on the scarred relationships among the group of men, including their unspoken agreement to share food, drink and women.  Much of the movie shows the hidden side of the war, focusing on areas such as how soldiers deal with killing balanced with how time is spend in between battles.  The men refer to their kills as ‘jobs’ in order to justify killing, and there is no scrimping on violent scenes in the movie.  Once scene shows Wardaddy forcing a teammate to not only kill a war prisoner, but to watch him die.

Overall, this powerful movie has a ring of truth to it as it captures the hidden side of the war, The Telegraph reports.

Fury was shown during the London Film Festival on October 19, and was released on October 12.

Ian Harvey

Ian Harvey is one of the authors writing for WAR HISTORY ONLINE