Fury

Fury" is one of the best movies made by Hollywood in a long long time.And notice that I'm not saying "best war movies..." butBest movies.The horror of the final months of World War II in Germany has never been depicted this well, and I only wish some more of the men who had been there were still around to discuss it, now that this movie was with us. One of those men was my father.But first, a bit about the authenticity.One of the worst things about many of the later World War II movies (most silly among them, "Patton") is that they got little or nothing right. American tank soldiers fought inside Sherman tanks, not those later American tanks (like the "Pattons" utilized in the movie "Patton"). And the Shermans were decent tanks -- except against the best of the Nazi armor. In order to do a decent job with the movie, "Fury" had to locate real Shermans (and a real German Tiger tank) that could be used. Otherwise, everything else would have been lost to the lack of authenticity, which is what the movie had to have.But more than that, the movie had to be authentic to the reality of the men who ended their war in Germany (and Austria and Czechslovakia, the last three countries to be taken -- and that's the correct word, not the Cold War "liberated" -- from the hands of the Nazi leadership) in May 1945. For the soldiers on the job with the U.S. forces during those months, the job was killing "Krauts", "Heinies..." etc. And the job of the "Krauts" was killing Americans (and British, Canadian, and French invaders coming from the West; or Russians from the East). Both sides got very good at their jobs."Fury" takes that job seriously, depicting the job by portraying the five-man crew of one Sherman tank during that last month before Adolf Hitler's suicide and the final surrender of the remnants of the Nazi empire. It the simplest way, "Fury" is another "War Movie" (caps necessary), a buddy movies, and more. A tank crew is led by Brad Pitt (as US Army S/Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier. As the movie begins, the crew consists of Shia LaBeouf as Boyd "Bible" Swan, Michael Peña as Cpl. Trini "Gordo" Garcia, and Jon Bernthal as Pfc. Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis. In the first nasty battle portrayed in the film, they have lost one of their crew, "Red." They receive a young replacement, Logan Lerman playing Pvt. Norman "Ellison (who doesn't get his non de guerre -- Machine" -- until nearly the end of the story). The tank platoon starts the movie with ten tanks, and by the end there is one. The film depicts how that comes about. The portrayal of the men doing the tank work should earn any of them at least an Oscar nomination, and their lives together inside that bucket of steel is portrayed in the claustrophobic horror that was actually experienced by U.S. tankers during those years -- and especially those final months. All that said, "Fury" might just have been another one of those war movies where the "kid"learns to be a good soldier thanks to the work of the "old man." But this isn't "Sand of Iwo Jima" or any of a dozen of the sanitized bedtime stories we were told as children in the 1950s and 1960s using Hollywood propaganda that began in the 1940s.In order to do his job, the "kid" has to be taught to be a killer, and he resists. Trained for a mere eight weeks to be a clerk typist, "Logan" is snatched from a replacement truck and ordered to be the machine gunner on "Fury." When he protests that his only military skill is typing "60 words a minute," Wardaddy begins the replacement's new training, with the help of the rest of the family who work inside "Fury." Norman has to become a killer to be a good worker and a fellow soldier, so that by the time the other men bestow on him his war name -- "Machine" -- he has learned his trade and is doing it well. "Idealism is peaceful," Brad Pitt's character tells Norman at one point. "History is violence." And that violence is depicted as almost never before in an American film (and rarely in others, one of which comes to mind -- the Russian "Stalingrad"... but that's another discussion for another time).By the time of that final battle scene, all the stages have been set, and all the cliches and pieties of previous American war movies have been obliterated or at least severely damaged. Wardaddy's life and fate are not out of "Sand of Iwo Jima" or any of a dozen other war myths that come to mind with alittle thought.This is important.One of the most pernicious bits of the historiography from the final months of World War II was the claim that the Americans were fighting "old men and kids" after the German Army "lost" its remaining major reserves in the Battle of the Bulge and Nordwind. Left out of that story is the fact that those "kids", some as young as 14 and 15, were fanatical Nazis who had been trained from the day they entered school under Hitler's versions of reality. As a result, they were as deadly as the men who had raped their way across Poland, France, and Russia a few years earlier.I have a hunch that "Fury" will get good reviews from the remaining men (and few women) who are still around who actually lived the combat of those months at the "end" of World War II in both Europe and "The Pacific." Sadly, I won't get to have those conversations with my parents, because both -- both combat veterans -- are long dead.My father ended his war after fighting through Germany into Austria with the 44th Infantry Division, one of the 80 or so U.S. divisions that never made it to Hollywood. He came home with one desire -- to begin that family he and my mother had promised each other when they got married a few months before Pearl Harbor. By April 1945, he was in the Army in Germany and she was in the Army (Army Nurse Corps) on Okinawa. The year 1945 was different for each of millions of men and women across the planet, but one of the jokes in our family was that they really understood the meaning of SNAFU. My mother enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps because the enlistment office promised her that she'd be there -- in Europe -- to patch up my Dad if he was hurt. Naturally, as soon as the paperwork was in, she was sent to the other side of the planet.But they did get together by December 1945, after the G.I. protests in "The Pacific" demanding that "Bring the Boys Home." (They didn't mention the girls; there weren't many of them).And so they got their dreams, and in September 1946 I was the first of the four children they had, keeping that promise from early 1941.But there were mysteries we never could solve.My father came home with a Bronze Star, a Combat Infantry Badge, and a "yearbook" from his regiment. My mother came home with a little mimeographed booklet of home addresses for all the men and women who had served on the island with her field hospital. Every Christmas, our home was filled with Christmas cards from all over, most of them the men and women Mom and Dad had "served" with.How does that relate to "Fury"?Like most boys growing up during the John Wayne 1950s, I wanted the stories. We read "Sergeant Rock" comics and say all those movies about World War II (which got less and less real as the Cold War decade went onward).No matter how many times I asked my Dad how he got his Bronze Star, the only answer he ever gave was "I got lost one night and I got lucky..."My mother, remembering her war, had nightmares until they took her over the edge. But since "PTSD" wasn't well known then -- and the American Dream said that women hadn't been in combat anyway -- her healing was more difficult than Dad's. He worked, his post "service" service being the U.S. Post Office.But the questions remained, and over the years they only grew. What were those wars in 1945 like?Well, little by little Hollywood is catching up with the facts that were reported early after the war, then suppressed in the lies of the Cold War.And one of the best things about the movie "Fury" is that it gets those who are paying attention back to that real war that American (and British, Canadian, and French) soldiers actually had to fight after they entered Der Vaterland in early 1945, following the termination of "The Bulge".The one thing that was certain, the Germans were not being "liberated" as the French and Belgians had been. The Germans were fighting -- virtually all of them -- and dying fanatically for the Reich. And as "Fury" depicts, those who had second thoughts were lynched by their own fellow citizens.That's why, as our fathers did explain, in very few words, every major city in Germany had to be reduced to rubble. By air and artillery, and finally house to house. Not all the Germans in 1945 were Nazis supporting Hitler's last festungs. Just the majority -- male and female, adults and "children."Fury does as good a job showing what those final weeks of the war in Europe were. As good as "were like" can offer. Because if we were paying attention, our parents taught us that war IS -- and not "like" anything else. Hollywood can only do so much, once Hollywood decides to try and tell a story honestly.I wish my Dad were still around so we could watch this movie and talk about it together, but he was buried 19 years ago alongside the brewery in Newark, New Jersey. My Mom had died ten years before that, never fully recovering from the nightmares she brought home with her from Okinawa. Medicated, she wrote hundreds of notes on slips of paper about he lives, by the end believing the Jesus was speaking to her -- between bouts of writing about the broken men, women and children she used her nursing skills for between April and September 1945.So now, Hollywood has brought us "Fury." It's about tankers, specifically the 2nd U.S, Armored Division fighting through Germany in April 1945. By then, Europe was a killing field from "East" (where the Russians were heading into Berlin) to the "West," where my father and a million young men like him were heading through Germany.One of the best things about "Fury" is that the men who play the tankers in it trained for their acting roles in two ways. They listened to the men who were still alive (not many) from the Second Armored Division. And then they got some "basic training" from Navy SEALS to give them a bit of a sense of what some of it was "like." I think they did a decent job in telling a brutal story that doesn't hedge on the realities those men faced in those days.As the movie notes at the beginning, most of the U.S. tankers in Europe were doomed men. The German armor was better than the U.S. tanks, and so, as "Fury" shows, Sherman tanks fighting German Tiger tanks were as a serious -- and suicidal -- disadvantage. There are dozens of scenes so authentic in the movie as to make you cringe, and the dialogue is as close to "reality" as possible. Men at war use the "F" word a lot, and in all its variations. None of the dialogue is cleaned up in "Fury" for some politically correct later day.There are a dozen scenes that make the movie memorable, and at least eight actors who deserve to be recognized for their work.But perhaps the final scene does as much as could be imagined.The lone survivor (I know, spoiler alert) is the kid' Norman, who at first refused to be a killer, as the war demanded."You're a hero buddy. You know that?" the soldiers who put him in the ambulance say as the scene ends the movie. And I have a hunch that most of the men who came home from those brutal months knew that a "Hero" was just a young many who had gotten lost one night and "got lucky."

Excellent movie. The ending was, “over the top/Hollywood”, but overall, a believable recreation that included the kinds of events that have been well documented from the European Theater WWII.As to whether or not the movie was realistic, right now I’m reading, “Death Traps; the survival of an armored division in WWII”. This book was written by, Belton Cooper. He was one of the men whose job it was to recover and repair damaged tanks from the battlefields during WWII (Europe). His unit also provided what passed for the very brief training that was offered to tank replacements toward the end of the war. He describes exactly the things that were depicted in the movie. “Fury” was fortunate to even have had a five man crew by the last month of the war. Belton describes what really happened; such a shortage of trained crews that some tanks were being operated with three man crews; commander/”loader”, gunner, and driver (NO assistant gunner/loader or hull machine gunner). Untrained replacements, the likes of the film’s “Norman” character, were very common to encounter. It was not at all unheard of for green tankers and their tanks to be destroyed on their way from the forward maintenance depot to their unit assembly areas. The Germans were operating under even worse handicaps regarding the shortage of trained tank crews (not to mention the extreme shortage of tanks).Similar to a scene in the movie, Belton even describes an occasion when an officer called for volunteers to recover the bodies (the pieces), and to clean up, the interior of a tank whose dead crew had been traumatically dismembered by enemy fire.Indeed, the film makers were pretty meticulous about realism, holding a lengthy closed door meeting between the cast and actual 80+ year old veterans of tank warfare; Europe WWII.People who claim that this movie is not realistic are simply not correct in that assessment. There are still plenty of living eyewitnesses who will testify to the contrary.The cast themselves are a pleasure to watch. Jon Bernthal is perfectly cast as “Coon Ass”. Bernthal (The Walking Dead) is almost unparalleled when it comes to portraying the morally ambivalent character type; the deeply flawed, not likeable, but not totally irredeemable character. Pitt does his usual excellent job. Lerman, Lebeouf and Pena are terrific as well.My only “complaint” with the movie is with the ending. The climactic battle is “Hollywood”; over the top, filled with flaws regarding the actual tactics an infantry unit would use in order to destroy an enemy tank, filled with flaws regarding the actual capabilities a lone tank would have in meeting such a threat and…..not very believable. But the worst part is that this movie would have been excellent with a more believable and accurate ending; nothing would have been sacrificed. In other words, it was unnecessary to go where this story went and a better movie would have resulted if they hadn’t. And the final result would still have been the same!But hey, it’s a movie.There have been many, many war movies; many of them NOT very good. Where does “Fury” rank? That is endlessly debatable, for sure, but I would place it up there with the best ones; “Das Boot”, the serial, “Band of Brothers”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “The Dirty Dozen”.“Fury is an interesting look at WWII from a specific point of view, that of an American Sherman tank crew. Enjoy it for what it is and don’t let its flaws ruin a movie experience that has much to recommend it. I give "Fury" five stars.