OT: Fury

[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) 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.