Yesterday’s post featured Sherman tanks facing Panzers on the Golan Heights in 1967, so let’s do a review of a movie about a Sherman tank crew late in World War II to make it an All Sherman Tank Weekend, because why the hell not? (Plus it’s a chance not to talk about the Wuhan coronavirus, China or the lockdown.)
Title: Fury
Director: David Ayer
Writer: David Ayer
Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal
IMDB entry
Fury is the story of the crew of a M4A2 Sherman tank crew driving deep into Germany in April of 1945. It starts with the aftermath of a battle where where the crew had to haul a dead crewmate out and every other American tank but the titular Fury was wiped out. Soon tank commander ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) welcomes green recruit Norm (Logan Lerman) as their new assistant driver/machinegunner. They’re sent with a new platoon of tanks to rescue a trapped unit and the lead tank is promptly taken out by a panzerfaust. Fury leads an assault on a German antitank unit in a treeline, then participates in taking a large German town, where the tank crew spends some occasionally tense R & R with two German fraulieins before moving out to help defend a key crossroads. On the way, all the tanks in the platoon but Fury are destroyed in an encounter with a Tiger tank. The last 45 minutes or so of the film depict Fury’s crew, one tread taken out by a mine, defending the crossroads against an SS company.
Fury succeeds when it focuses on being a World War II tank film, and loses momentum when tries to Make Serious Statements About The Human Condition And How War Is Hell.
The scenes that work best are the everyday lives of the crew. They used real Shermans in the film, and the scenes inside the tank have the convincing claustrophobia of a real tank interior. (Though they vastly understate how noisy a tank interior is; some of that is inevitable, as no audience would want to watch an entire tank movie with the noise as loud as an actual tank, but the nosiebed here should have been louder to at least give a hint of the real thing.) The battle scenes are gripping, and the attention to detail pretty good; I especially liked the improvised log armor on the sides, and the use of different types of main gun ammunition for different purposes, including laying down smoke just like in the instructional videos.
A video tour of the interior of a Sherman (with some clips from the movie) is here:
Ignore the guy in the knight’s helmet.
On the other hand, no World War II unit used that many tracer rounds in daylight, and they didn’t look like lasers.
It’s the Deep Meaning Of It All Scenes that drag the movie down. Norm fails to machine-gun teenage German troops with the panzerfausts, with Dire Consequences. Collier forces Norm to shoot a German prisoner to Prove His Loyalty. A burning soldier shoots himself in the head. Another falls on a live grenade. After Norm makes out with a hot frauliein, want to guess who gets killed in a random artillery barrage?
No cliche will be left behind.
Despite that, the acting is very good. Pitt is fine as Hardened Stoic Leader Who Will Get His Men Through. Lerman is good in the green ostensible-viewpoint character role. Michael Pena (Luis in the Ant Man films) is solid as driver (and semi-comic relief) Gordo. Jon Berenthal does fine in the thankless “rude redneck with bad hygiene” role of gun-loader Coon-Ass.
Weirdly enough, the actor who comes out best is Shia LaBeouf as gunner Boyd “Bible” Swan. He brings a quiet, understated dignity to a role as a devout Christian, and “quiet,” “understated” and “dignity” are adjectives that seldom accrue to LaBeouf in any aspect of his life, and whose acting usually tops out at “only mildly annoying.” Jason Isaacs is also excellent in a supporting role as a gritty, unsentimental, matter-of-fact Captain.
Fury is worth watching, but it really could have been about 45 minutes shorter. The best war movies tend to be those that focus on soldiers just trying to do The Task At Hand (Das Boot being the classic example) and not worrying about making Deep Meaningful Statements.
6/10
Also, Hollywood needs to make more movies about tanks.
Here’s the trailer:
Tags: Brad Pitt, David Ayer, Jon Bernthal, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Military, movie review, Sherman tank, Shia LaBeouf, tanks, Tiger Tank, video, World War II
Good article, but 2 minor errors. Fury was an M4E3E8 (known at the time as the “easy 8”), not an M4A2. Also, the wood carried on tanks was for use to aid when getting stuck in mud or snow, not as auxiliary armor, which it would have been very poor at.
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