OT: Fury

[Raellus]

Or, Furious about Fury.

Saw Fury tonight. Overall, I thought it was terrible. The first two thirds of the film were just kind of meh, but that last third was so awful, it completely ruined everything that preceded it. I figure I owe y'all an explanation for such a definitive panning so here goes. What follows is a spoiler-filled review. Read on at your own peril.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

__________________________________________________ ____________

There were a couple of good things about the movie. The costumes were decent, as were the sets. The vehicles were well-dressed, accurate reproductions.

There was one really suspenseful, fairly well done battle scene where four Shermans take on a Tiger I. They got the Tiger and Tiger hunting tactics just about right and the Tiger replica was pretty spot on. It looked better than the T-34 chassis-based model used in Saving Private Ryan.

That's about it.

Now for the bad. Stop reading now if you still think you want to pay full price to go see this terrible movie.

....


There was no plot/story to speak of. The characters were pretty one-note. There wasn't much beyond the basic, clichéd war movie archtypes. The one major minority character- the Mexican-American tank driver- was almost a parody of Hispanic culture. Of the titular tank's crew of five, only a couple of them were even remotely likeable. Pitt's performance was weak. A few times during Fury, I thought I was watching his character from Inglorious Basterds, a far superior role/performance in a far superior film. At least that movie was self-conscious about playing loose with history, and it had an actual story to tell. Fury, on the other hand, had neither.

The climactic battle scene was a farce. I'm still angry about it. First of all, it was basically a rip-off of the climactic battle scene in SPR: one small group of Americans- this time, in a mine-disabled Sherman- protecting a crossroads against a battalion of well-armed and motivated Waffen SS Panzergrenadiers.

First of all, the whole scenario didn't make any sense. There was no explanation why this particular cross-roads was essential to defend. All of my extensive reading on the last month of WWII makes perfectly clear that, with the end so close in sight, Western Allied troops were very averse to taking risks, especially senseless ones. Yet, this lonely five-man tank crew chooses what they realize will be a suicidal last stand instead of heading back to friendly lines and coming back later with the tens of thousands of American troops deliberately battering their way towards Berlin. WHY? This wasn't adequately answered. It was a ridiculous premise for a ridiculous finale.

The Germans basically launched about a dozen human wave assaults against the disabled tank, getting mown down in droves in the process. This literally lasts for like 20 minutes. They don't try to flank the Sherman or use cover to get close to the buttoned-down tank. They just charge is across open space, ignoring the huge hedge on one side and burning farmhouse on the other. They might as well have been zombies with guns and decent 40 times. It was ridiculous. At least three German troops made it onto the Sherman and all were dumb enough to stick their heads in the open hatch- to be promptly shot in the face- instead of lifting the lid and dropping in a potato masher or two. The Waffen SS were many things, but they weren't stupid. Anyone with any competence in basic tactics, let alone combat experience, could have killed the Sherman with hundreds of fewer casualties. I could have done it by myself. By the end of the film, at least 100 dead Germans are strewn around the Sherman. It was one of the most ridiculously unrealistic battle scenes I've ever seeb and it completely ruined any good will might have remained from the first two acts of the movie.

Don't waste your time and money. If you really must see it, wait for it to come out on Redbox or Netflix. It pretty much sucked.

[Targan]

Damn. I've already bought tickets for myself and my brother to see an advance screening of it on Monday night. Oh well :o

[Cdnwolf]

The moment I saw Brad Pitt's name on it, I thought... another Stinkeroo.. (WWZ comes to mind).

I play World of Tanks and they have a cooperative marketing campaign going on with the movie so we were getting flooded with info about behind the scenes etc....

Definately not worth the money ...

[dragoon500ly]

Well just got back from seeing Fury...and I have to concur, lack luster plot, lack luster cast...utter waste of funds. If you get the urge to watch this movie, bring a good book!

[Panther Al]

Haven't seen it yet myself, but for what its worth there is a reason that Tiger looks so close to perfect.


From what I am told is that it was Tiger 131 in the flesh.

[stormlion1]

Saw it today, it was decent but the middle of the film drags a bit and yes, that Tiger I was the last operational Tiger tank out there. As for the crossroads being important it came up earlier in the film, a quick set of orders to take and hold it against a known enemy force and the crossroads being a open road into the American Army's backfield. There is mention of it being nothing but cooks, clerks, and medics just down the road. Though from the map you get to see it was at least five miles from crossroads to that rear area. Characters were one dimensional though, stereotypes honestly. If they had put some real action into the middle of the movie and not a 'play house with the frauliens' bit it would have been much better.

[Raellus]

I suppose there was a reason to hold but it felt forced. I'm not sure how a battalion of Waffen SS without tanks was going to drive into the Allied rear anyway. Why not shoot at them at range with the main gun and the MGs, stall them for a while, and then beat feet back to friendly lines? That scene was just dumb.

As for the playing house scene, I was uncomfortable throughout. Pitt's character started the episode giving off a really rapey vibe and I worried for the safety of the girls, even moreso when the hillbilly a-hole showed up. Aside from the Tiger duel, that was the most suspenseful part of the film.

I had to step out to take a piss- I left when I though the girls were safe and when I came back...


SPOILER ALERT


... their flat had been blown up and the pretty young fraulein was dead.

WHAT HAPPENED? Stray allied bomb? German artillery? That girl was about the most likeable character from the whole film.

[Wolf sword]

I saw it last night, it was good, not great but good.

The characters were the lacking thing for me, I'm sure that the writer for the screenplay had a fully developed backstory for them but we did not get to see any of it. Like why the conflict between "wardaddy" and "bible" .

[kato13]

The writer and the director were the same person (David Ayer (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0043742/reference)) so if elements were lost he only has himself to blame.

His other writing credits include Training Day, Swat, and Fast and the Furious. Saw SWAT and it was not impressive, but heard good things about Training Day.

[stormlion1]

Its kind of obvious some sections were cut, probably giving a reason why they are all the way they are but the movie was about these guys, who have been together since Africa having to deal with a new guy and the near end of the war. And when they have the chance to run, they don't. These are five guys who don't like each other but depend on each other and have gone through hell with each other and are not going to leave any one of them in a pinch. Even the new guy. Had to think about why the SS unit didn't just go around the tank when it kind of hit me as to why. The trucks that were following the SS unit couldn't go around, the ground was to wet and they would sink in plus the fact is there were probably more mines. The trucks were probably carrying ammo and the Panzerfausts we see them using as we see them pulling out crates full of them. They had to clear the crossroad or they could only go on with what they could carry, which is not enough.

[Raellus]

Ok. I get your point about why the Waffen SS try so hard to capture the crossroads, but why don't they just flank the Sherman and kill it with one of the literally dozens of Panzerfausts they've got with them? Why not just use the hedge/ditch to sneak in close and zap it with an AT rocket? Or loop around the big burning farm house? Or both? Why launch a dozen frontal human wave attacks?

If the movie was set on Saipan or Okinawa, where last-ditch Banzai charges were de rigueur, the enemy tactics would have made more sense. If the director had made the enemy Volkssturm, OK. But against what looked like battle-hardened Waffen SS panzergrenadiers? No.

I'll suspend my disbelief if a writer/director doesn't blatantly insult my intelligence. That battle scene was a nasty yo' momma snap spat right in my face.

-

[Webstral]

I liked it.

I didn't worry about whether it was perfectly believable because it's fiction. It's not meant to be a documentary. One takes it on faith that fighting men do stupid things, along with smart things, brave things, and cowardly things. Foolishness in combat is common, from the private solider through every level of leadership. Events like the raid on German 88s in Normandy during "Band of Brothers" are remarkable specifically because technically proficient application of principles in combat are much more rare than anybody thinks they ought to be.

When it comes to behaviors in combat, realism is a hard thing to gauge because people who have been fighting for more than 100 days behave very differently than people who have been fighting less than 100 days, who behave completely differently than people who have not been fighting at all. My unit was relieved by a brigade from the 101st Airborne. They came out to the checkpoint acting like every window had a sniper. We laughed about that. They looked so green, even though some of them had been in Iraq during OIF1 or 2. In some ways, their behaviors were better than ours. Any window could have been hiding a sniper. After a while, we got acclimatized to the idea that we weren't going to get shot from the windows, and that the handful of guys we had in overwatch had the situation sufficiently under control that guys on the ground could worry about threats coming from the ground. Looking back, I think this attitude could have been exploited. We got lucky, I guess. Still, it does make me laugh that the Regular Army heroes just arriving flinched every time they heard automatic fire from a kilometer distant when in Baghdad that might as well as well be on the Moon. People in combat are different.

We lost a guy to a car bomb in an incident that should have been preventable. Again at the checkpoint, a civilian car was parked just outside the checkpoint watching cars go in and out. This is a no-no. It should have been challenged. It was not. Finally, the guy tried to get into the military lane and get through the checkpoint. One of our guys stopped him and asked for ID because no civilians go in through the military lane. Long story short, car bomb. Several civilians, several Iraqi troops, and one of our guys. Had we been on our game, we would have sent someone forward to challenge the driver while he was sitting and observing. During the the third year of the war, it's hard to imagine how we just let him sit there watching the checkpoint. Were I writing fiction, I'd be shouted down for portraying unrealistic behavior. Yet it happened.

I did not allow anyone to just hang out in view of the checkpoint when I was in the tower thereafter. A single tracer into the ground or the pavement near the offending party is the universal language for "F*** off!" Nobody failed to get that message on my watch.

The point is that unrealistic things happen all the time in combat. People make bad decisions all the time for a variety of reasons, and those decisions get people killed in all different numbers and manners. The kind of combat I saw on a small scale was maddeningly hard to manage. Amp that up to WW2 scale, and the inexplicable becomes routine. The characters of "Fury" were veterans. While they probably got some rest after North Africa, we know for a fact that they fought at Falaise 9-10 months beforehand and quite possibly in the Bulge. They were on the verge of coming unglued. They were coming unglued. It's difficult for us with full bellies and a relative lack of life-or-death moments in our lives recently to say which behaviors executed by men who have been in high tempo combat for the better part of a year are realistic. If we walk away with the idea that we must not embrace any more of this activity lightly, then we may have gleaned what needs to be gleaned from this story. At this moment in history, we can stand to have a reminder that war is 1 part glory, 4 parts mud, and 7 parts unhuman brutality. Maybe "Fury" is just what the chicken hawks clamoring for a renewed American effort in the Middle East need to see.

[Raellus]

Like I said earlier, if the writer/director respects the audience's intelligence, I'm willing to forgive lapses of realism and suspend some disbelief. On the other hand, if the director asks the audience to take all kinds of flights of fantasy and leaps of logic in order to accept a highly implausible situation and completely irrational behavior by all parties involved, then no I am not. If a writer/director's going to pretty much ignore historical realities and context, why not just make a sci-fi pic? Really, if you just turn the Germans into giant bugs, that last scene could have been something out of Starship Troopers (the movie).

One party acting stupidly? OK. Both parties acting stupidly? That last battle scene could just as well have been an episode of Bumfights.

Web, I hope you are right about the message. Sadly, I fear that hawks are going to get a very different lesson from a movie like Fury, though.

-

[Webstral]

That last battle scene could just as well have been an episode of Bumfights.-

That made me laugh. Nicely said.

[Targan]

Saw it last night. It was ok. The shooty bits were suitably violent and gory but the talky bits just got in the way.

*SPOILERS*

The scene in the apartment with the German women was a total waste of time. The shooting of the German prisoner on his knees after a couple of minutes of US soldiers standing around laughing at him was borderline glorification of war crimes IMO. I'm no bleeding heart and I totally get that the enemy will tend to be shot when they're trying to surrender, let's face it, it would take enormous self control not to shoot someone that had just been trying to kill you and had no doubt just shot some of your friends. But making the guy suffer for a few minutes, the poor bastard hoping that he'd be allowed to live, and then that brutal scene with Norman being physically forced by Wardaddy to shoot the prisoner? Not cool.

I couldn't get my head around the SS Panzergrenadiers' tactics at the end either. Maybe they were a late-war inexperienced formation, out of their heads on crystal meth and all fanatical and crazy? Some good exploding head moments there anyway. To quote Bunny from Platoon "I ain't never seen a head come apart like that" :D

[Olefin]

Lots of German and American prisoners got shot out of hand during the war, especially later in the war of Germans by Americans.

My own great uncle told me how at Omaha they had shot out of hand several German POW's who had just surrendered. In the heat of battle a lot of men on both sides who had just seen their buddies killed in droves really didnt care too much about what others might see as war crimes.

And I agree on those tactics - those are more like what a Chinese or Japanese commander would come up with, not a German. Unless their commander was some kind of deskbound officer who had never been in combat and had no idea of tactics beyond what he read in wartime propaganda. The only way that scene would have been accurate would be if it was Hitler Youth forces - have read a lot about some incredibly stupid things they did in 1945 because they literally knew nothing about tactics except to charge the enemy.

[Wolf sword]

A bunch of the guys I know who reenact German army during ww2 saw it with a German ww2 vet. They tell me Yogi (the vet) said the last battle was all wrong, even at that point in the war they would have called in artillery and leveled the building and the tank at the crossroads.

[stormlion1]

Counts what's available, this was set in the last month of the war when the bulk of what was available was rerouted to face the Russians and keep them from Berlin. Quite a few German Commanders were more interested in holding the line with the Russians and hoping the Brits and Americans would take Berlin so they could hopefully get a better deal. They didn't know the US and Brits had written Berlin off and they wanted the industrial plants in the West of Germany.

[Raellus]

Counts what's available, this was set in the last month of the war when the bulk of what was available was rerouted to face the Russians and keep them from Berlin. Quite a few German Commanders were more interested in holding the line with the Russians and hoping the Brits and Americans would take Berlin so they could hopefully get a better deal. They didn't know the US and Brits had written Berlin off and they wanted the industrial plants in the West of Germany.

This is another reason why the film's suicidal German banzai charges on a disabled tank in late April of '45 were all wrong.

[RN7]

I saw it this afternoon. I enjoyed it for the most part, particularly the tank-on-tank scenes. I've seen better but also have seen a lot worse. It wasn't Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, but it will be good to buy on DVD and watch with a few beers.

[Olefin]

Lets say this - I put that last battle's realism on a par with 107 out of the USN's 108 attack subs being sunk in a war with the Soviet Navy while somehow a noisy Soviet boomer with no escorting submarines survives for months in the North Atlantic after coming up to fire its nukes no less than three separate times

nuff said

[kcdusk]

Late to the party but my thoughts below;

A single tank with 5 men in it travelling across the country, very T2K-ish.

Lots of scenes with tanks driving over bodies, men burning, slop, T2K-atmospheric.

The CGI tracer bullets were very good. The battle scenes were very good, confusing, loud, disorientating at times, how i think battle would be. The sounds of battle were great (I watched wearing headphones).

Tank breaking down and needing to be fixed, T2K!

Using decoy or tactics to draw an enemy in, T2K!

I liked how when tanks were hit, the round punched in leaving a nice hole behind and the inside of the tank glowing/on fire. Seemed more real than the tank just "exploding" like a car in a mid-80's tv series might.

Fighting a little "drunk", felt realistic.

Not as good as Private Ryan. Band of Brothers for mine sits on top for best movie/TV show.

The playing house scene was 8 minutes too long.

Use of smoke.

Everyone having a nickname.

It took the SS about 3 hours and 300 men too long before they broke out the Panzerfausts to take on the tank.

Best job i ever had.

[jester]

What, no German 88s?

And was the MG 42 well represented?

[Cpl. Kalkwarf]

The Tiger was a real Tiger 1. Its the restored one that the Brits captured in Aftica.