[projekktor id=’15716′]
David Ayer does not seem like a guy you want to mess with. The American writer/director has made a career for himself making films of tough, damaged men put into violent and dangerous circumstances. Most of the time these characters are police officers, as in last year’s End of Watch or his Academy Award winning Training Day (which he wrote). However with his newest Ayer enters unknown territory, taking his signature brand of unflinching violence and machismo dialogue to the well-trod battlefields of the World War II picture.
Fury follows the five man crew of a US Army Sherman tank during the waning months of World War II. Though the war is all but finished for Germany, the fighting is still ferocious (a title card at the outset informs us that Hitler as declared “total war”). Over the course of a few days, the tank crew moves from town to town through the wasted countryside duking it out in small, claustrophobic battles with desperate groups of enemies often made up of civilians or children.
Brad Pitt leads the tank crew as Sgt. Wardaddy, a scarred and scowling veteran who has sworn to bring his crew through the war unscathed. A seeming second cousin to Pitt’s role in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, Wardaddy is a harsh and uncompromising father figure to the men. Like a good hockey coach, his high expectations and focus on discipline give the men beneath him confidence enough to do their jobs well. Unfortunately his promise to get them through the war unscathed is compromised from the get-go as our first introduction to the crew sees them pulling a dead gunner from the tank.
As in much of Ayer’s work, the focus of the film is the relationship between men forced into dangerous and stressful situations. The tank crew are haunted, rattled men scooped hollow by a long campaign that has stretched from North Africa to Belgium to Germany. Each brings something different to the tank – Shia LaBouef’s teary-eyed padre “Bible” provides a sensitivity, Jon Bernthal’s near lunatic “Coon-Ass” a savagery and Michael Pena’s “Gordo” a quiet efficiency. Together they fit together like pieces of machinery, less individual human beings and more cogs in the churning machinization of death that is the film’s prime focus.
The dehumanization of Fury’s crew is witnessed by the audience through Logan Lerman’s Norman, who enters the equation as the replacement for the crew’s recently deceased gunner. As if reminding him at the outset that he is in a David Ayer movie, Norman’s first job is mopping the entrails of his predecessor off of his new seat. A job which he does poorly, suggesting he’d be about as good a janitor as he is a tank gunner. Trained as a clerk and promoted to the front lines by accident, Norman is repulsed by the tank and the savage men who man her. Thrust into life-and-death situations however, Norman is quickly converted to a killer under the brutal tutorship of Wardaddy and his crew.
It’s hard not to be thrilled by the film as you watch. Ayer’s battle scenes are expertly constructed and feel frighteningly real. Roman Yasyanov films the hellish landscapes in washed out greys and browns, using the occasional calm moment to compose a shot that feel like the poetry of death. The sound design catches every zip and twang as rounds bounce off the tank, echoing through it’s metal belly. And death is ever-present. The film doesn’t shy away from the gory reality of war, in fact it places it front and centre. Tank commanders are blown in half by rounds, piles of decomposing bodies are bulldozed into pits and skulls are crunched beneath the treads of the tanks.
Like last year’s Lone Survivor, the film places authenticity of combat before all else. Though the marketing efforts made both films look like a recruitment tools for the Army, in actuality they feel more like scared-straight videos for kids toying with the idea of joining. However, while Lone Survivor had at it’s heart a major moral dilemma, Fury’s crew has long since passed contemplating their actions. Corrupted so thoroughly by the demands of war, the crew shoot prisoners with barely a blink. And though some effort is provided to show their humanity during a mid-film sequence in which they break into an apartment where two German woman are hiding, it’s quickly back to death and mayhem.
And when the film is focused on the death and mayhem, it’s pretty darn entertaining. A sequence in which three of the Sherman tanks rumble across a field to rescue some comrades pinned-down by German machine guns is the type of glorious chaos that will have you shouting “I love the smell of tank exhaust in the morning!” Later, when Fury and a far superior Tiger tank circle each other like a dance, it feels like the final boss level of a video game. The tank crew work together in perfect harmony to outwit and elude their enemy, searching for it’s weak spot. It’s a bravura action set-piece by Ayer, but it makes you wish he had a co-writer who could do equally dynamic things with the film’s dramatic moments.
“Just wait until you see what a man can do to another man” says Shia LeBouef’s Bible to Norman early in the film. It’s basically like Ayer is challenging himself. Any deep questions about war that the film might provoke are quickly washed away by a tidal wave of blood and destruction. And though it can feel at times like a celebration of that violence, there’s no questions Fury is an expertly realized piece of action filmmaking. Performed with confidence and commitment by the cast, the film is an engrossing experience, and one that most likely captures the true experience of armoured personnel like nothing has before. It just so happens to be an experience no one wants to live through again.
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