Fury (2014) is a fantastic depiction of the end of World War 2 that I feel a lot of people dismissed

I rewatched Fury the other day and I really was reminded that despite some flaws, it's one of my favorite war movies of all time. The setting and historical context were very well done, in a way that I've never seen before in an American WW2 film. Although there is plenty of combat action it's really a film about what war does to a person's psyche, and how soldiers lean on each other to survive mentally as much as they do physically in combat. It takes place during the final American drive into western Germany, a time that's often glossed over in WW2 history. In reality the drive into Germany cost the US nearly the same number of casualties as D-day and the breakout in Normandy, and Fury really shows that there was plenty of hard fighting in the last months of the war.

One thing that Fury does exceptionally well is showing the general state of the Army in late WW2-worn out, beaten down, and suffering from manpower shortages. The Battle of the Bulge a few months earlier was the costliest battle in US Army history, and the Army struggled to make up casualties that were lost in that fight. There was a mix of combat veterans and brand new, barely-trained replacements on the front lines, which gives Fury its setting.

The performances of the cast are fantastic-they are truly ground down by war and suffering from hardcore PTSD, but still functioning and doing their jobs. There are a number of small hints at their story and how they had gotten through the war (I especially appreciated Gordo's recollection of mopping up the Falaise pocket) and the relationships they have between each other are really believable-they really feel like a crew that's been together for years.

I've always been a military history nerd, and the amount of small details that Fury gets right are exceptional-bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into mass graves, Brad Pitt's character using a captured German assault rifle as his personal weapon, massive formations of American heavy bombers streaming overhead to level cities, Jason Isaac's character wearing a captured Luftwaffe flight jacket, and the general look of the infantrymen-these guys really look like they've been fighting and living outside for months on end. One thing that's consistent in front-line veterans' memoirs is their recollections of just how filthy everything was after fighting on the line for a few weeks, and they really look the part. I also liked how unflinching the movie was when showing their attitudes towards fighting-most of the veteran soldiers were hardened killers by this point, and Fury doesn't shy away from this.

This film was criticized heavily by tank buffs for its Tiger fight scene (historically the model of Sherman tank in the film could have killed the Tiger from 800+ yards away), but IMO it's a really well done example of American tanks being outgunned at times by German tanks and an exciting scene overall, plus it has the only functioning Tiger tank in the world in it. The final battle is where things unravel a bit, although I believe it's based on Audie Murphy's stand that won him the Congressional Medal of Honor. A lot of the other things that I've seen criticized on the internet are actually directly from veterans' memoirs. All in all I feel that Fury is a worth a watch for anyone who's interested in WW2 and wants to see a version of history that isn't colored by nostalgia or afraid to show the unpleasant details of war.

Submitted September 18, 2021 at 10:13PM by rivetcityransom https://ift.tt/2VVtTsq