Fury: Male Bonding Has It's Costs...

It is 1945 and the Allied Army is rolling up Germany.  Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is the tank commander (TC) of the stalwart crew of the Sherman tank "Fury".  They've been through the hellfire of war together, starting in North Africa.  They are now an elite armor crew, knowing how to move and fight their machine with lethal efficiency.  They can be put in odds stacked far against them and make the enemy, a fearsome foe, pay in blood and steel many times over.  But the war has taken its toll on this team of American soldiers. 

When the film opens, Fury has apparently just been through a vicious engagement and we see Wardaddy take out a German officer in a hand to hand ambush.  They seem to be the lone survivor on a carnage laden battlefield.  They also just lost their assistant driver and will need a new troop.  They get one, PVT Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a rear echelon soldier trained as a staff clerk, with the lethal skill of typing "sixty words a minute".  He has the privilege of taking the assistant driver position.  Initially, the tight knit crew, not surprisingly, is not that welcoming to the new soldier.  In the first engagement Ellison participates in, the horror of what is asked of him overwhelms him, and Wardaddy takes some drastic measures to try to cure him of it, as his reticence is a liability to Fury and its crew.

Later, we see scenes of the crew of Fury taking some RnR in a German village, and we get more of a look at where the minds and souls of Fury's crew are at in this stage of the game.  This war and what they have had to do to play their part has had its cost.  However, it is made plain that they aren't entirely unaware of this.

And when it is all said and done, even with the Germans, it is plain that for the most part, we aren't talking about monsters here.  We are talking about men trained to do a deadly serious job.  Prosecuting that job costs.  War costs.  Not just in money in blood, but in damage on the inside that haunts one long after the shooting is done.

And that is what Fury depicts, despite on the surface appearing to take on the trappings of a traditional Hollywood war movie.

 

 

 

War is indeed hell, a place where demons dwell.  And they will have their payment in humanity, one way or another.

 

 

Good flick, for both that and some awesome tank on tank action.