"FURY" - Highly Recommended New WWII Film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2713180/

I'm a big WWII buff, so I don't throw out my recommendations lightly. This is pretty damn good for a big Hollywood budget film. Though not in the same class as "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line," still, this is probably the single most brutal depiction of combat I have ever seen.

Without giving anything away (of course), it follows a US Sherman tank crew who have been together since 1942, across North Africa, France, Belgium, and now into Germany in April 1945. The war is almost over for Germany and the tankers are meeting hellacious resistance in their travels.

It's cool, because I can't think of a movie which focused solely on the life of a tank crew. It was a short life, because the average life expectancy of a tank crew was about 6 weeks. These guys had done it for several years...and their time in a claustrophobic death-trap shows!

Now, that's not to say that there isn't any over the top moments in the film. One gets the impression that the experiences of these 5 men could have been drawn from the experiences of close to a dozen. Nevertheless, I don't find any real fault in compressing time like this, especially to show some of the atrocities that can happen to men at war, as a whole. It's not it's infeasible that these men ran across what they did, or accomplished so much in a day's journey. They had to keep the film going at a steady pace...and it moves real quick!

Note, that in the making of this film they consulted several living veterans of WWII Sherman tank crews for accuracy. It shows. Even in the way they had to move the tank's antenna aside to make sure it doesn't get snagged on anything. Little details. Even the German traces vs. the American tracer rounds were spot on (though I can't be certain anyone used tracers as much as the films delivers)

I don't think it's giving anything away to state that Sgt. Don Collier (Brad Pitt), periodically takes on the personae of his varying crew members, or vice versa; it's a little difficult to tell. There's a certain insanity that each of these crew members posses - little ticks or mannerisms - that they swap back and forth: chiefly because they have been around each other so much, but additionally because in war a certain brain sickness is infectious. It's so infectious, in fact, that I really appreciated that the G.I.s didn't act as if they were the cowboys on white horses coming to save the day, as many war films depict. No, the line drawn between the good guys and bad guys is very fuzzy, indeed.

Anyway, go see it! Or, wait to buy it on blu ray. I was actually shocked at how good it was. Great acting all the way around, too!

 

Thanks for the review. Looking forward to this one.

 

Getting very good reviews and made good money this past weekend.

 

Saw it on Friday, first show. Sound wise, lots of subwoofer action, especially with the .50 caliber.

 

Very well done movie...

Saw it Cinemark XD and it sounded great.

 

May have to make my first visit to 'the pictures' in 6 years for this one.

 

Great movie, I enjoyed it very much. It's truly a war movie so be ready for that. My wife liked it too and she hates gratuitous violence in movies so it didn't sway into unnecessary gore.
The acting was very good, these guys were heroes.

 

No offense to this movie, which looks very good, shouldn't have this been the year of a big WWI film?

 

Well, yeah! Sometime between 2014 - 2018 (1914-1918)...But Great War films are hard to come by, and even more difficult for filmmakers to get them right.

I often wonder if anybody in the US cares, 100 years later. In France, the UK, Canada and Australia they seem to have at least a little more success with Great War films. Great War books a little more. Then again, you can't walk 100 yards in those countries and not come across some sort of memorial or plaque (I'm exaggerating - but you know what I mean).

In recent years, the French film Joyeux Noel was fairly good, but a little factually off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyeux_Noël

Passchendaele, out of Canada, was well thought out, and fairly spot on. A few things were a bit over the top (pun intended).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passchendaele_(film)

Beneath Hill 60, from Australia, was very good, with not much to complain about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_Hill_60

I still need to see, Private Peaceful (2012) and Forbidden Ground (2013), the later seems very promising.

Now, for the last several year All Quiet on the Western Front has been in the pipe for another remake, supposedly with Daniel Radcliff signed on to play Paul Baumer. I'm not a fan of remakes (especially a 3rd go), but the book, itself, is so filmic that it really begs to get a modern take, where previous versions couldn't show what the book describes, because of the times in which they were made.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016150/

It's my favorite war to study. My great-grandfather fought in the 9th Scottish Division from 1915-1918, making it all the way through as a private. The stories he told were...well, as he got older he was able to speak more about it. His recall was astounding. They were harrowing stories.

 

Seen it on imax.
Excellent.

 

Saw it last night. Intense movie! I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.

 

3D missed opertunity.

 

I usually enjoy war movies and like Brad Pitt, but this one didn't do it for me. I did enjoy the "tank" action sequences, but the movie over all was just okay. Some real bone heads wrote the script.

SPOILER: don't read below if you don't want to:
So the tank is disabled and the crew is prepared to fight off an elite Germany company. Suddenly, in the middle of the fight, they run out of ammo. Don't worry . . . we've got plenty more stored on the OUTSIDE of the tank. Since we didn't have any foresight to prepare for such an eventuality, we'll climb out of the tank during the intense fire fight, dodge the German bullets, grab the ammo, and then come back in and finish the battle. Duh.

 

I don't intend to see this thing, as the following review by a respected critic is pretty damning:

FURY is a rather infuriating film. World War II is a distant memory now, and David Ayer's feature doesn't have anything very new to add to the movies set during that awful period. Unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino who also starred Brad Pitt in a World War II movie, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, and had fun with it, you could hardly describe anything about this film as fun. It's true that many of the action scenes are very well staged, and that the scene in which Collier and Norman visit the apartment of a couple of German women is filled with tension, but the film suffers from the fact that none of the characters is given anything in the way of a back story - we know nothing about them, and so it's hard to care about them, even when they do an unlikely 300 Spartans for the film's protracted climax. In addition, much of the heavily-accented dialogue is pretty incomprehensible.

 

Wonder if they will be a uncut version, pretty strong as is.

 

Well...to be honest with myself (and you, for that matter), everything he said after, "WWII is a distant memory now," was, and is, piddly. The critique of the film - the "opinion," in this case - matters little to me; it is miniscule; it served only as the springboard for my ire - being, in whole, the reason I tore into the review - perhaps undeservedly; nevertheless, justifiable, inasmuch as statements like these are precisely the reasons why veterans of the First World War are now as "distant" as the black & white photos they inhabit.

The fact is, the reviewer was not commenting on the film at all, with this sentence. The movie is a big nothing. The millions of living veterans who served in WWII, however, are a big something: who are as tangible and close as the air we breathe. They breathe air, still; and it was a slap to the face. Simply stated, I found his sentence callous and ignorant, but above all, symptomatic of several generations who have taken everything, but have little idea how to give, in return.

Had he not included this sentence I would have taken no umbrage at all. The past is, indeed, prologue. As someone who served, as my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father before me, I can only hope that the sacrifices of my forefathers are not disremembered due to some passing fops who fancies that their pens are really swords.

 

WWII happened, get over it. So did WWI and the Boer War and...insert a thousand other wars. So what? His was a review of a movie with which he found some serious faults (I only posted an excerpt).

I'd also like to point out (not that it really matters) that the reviewer is into his seventies and British born, so he'd have a pretty good idea of the period in question, having grown up in the immediate aftermath of the war. I only mention this because you seem to attach some significance to having 'direct experience'. To me, it's wholly irrelevant . What is relevant is whether the movie is worth seeing. I've decided no.

 

It always amazes me that someone who won't bother seeing a movie feels compiled to trash it on these boards. I give a lot more attention to someone who actually watched the movie than someone who just wants to be provocative and run everything down.

 

Hmm. Maybe he better wait for another "fun" war movie to come out.

 

If you read carefully, I never trashed the movie - I posted a reviewer's opinion. It amazes me how people can read into comments things not in evidence.

 

TOMATOMETER
78%
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 194
Fresh: 152
Rotten: 42

Audience score: 90% liked it

 

You need to go back and read your own posts. You did quite a bit more than just post a reviewer's opinion. Who's the reviewer?

 

I give it a 4/10 for the war scenes; weak dialogues, absent screenplay; the clichés ( the "love" scene, the girl's corpse emerging from the bricks, the germans running to their death by attacking frontally the tank, too stupid after to throw a grenade in the tank knowing that there are enemies that killed dozens of their comrades minutes before, and the german soldier who lets alive an enemy that killed half a division)... I thought this kind of movies disappeared half a century ago.

 

I read back. Where did I do 'quite a bit more than just post a reviewer's opinion'?