The Weekend Review: Fury

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

The reason why it took me so long to see Fury largely comes down to petty childishness.  I resented the fact that it was not what the first minute of its trailer had lead me to believe it to be: a Nick Fury origins film.  This was before Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out and blew the lid off of Nick Fury's backstory within the MCU, and Nick Fury as a tank commander seemed not just plausable, but pretty damned awesome.  In fact, it still does.

Now, that certainly has nothing to do with and is completely unfair towards the unrelated movie that we did receive.  It's not the movie's fault, not really even the trailer's when it really comes down to it, but that perceived switcheroo kept me out of the theaters, even when I could have seen it for free.  And that's the real shame, because Fury is an incredibly unique take on the tired retread of World War II dramas that always seem to be in fashion because it was the last martial conflict where we were obviously the good guys and our enemies were obviously the bad guys.

And that's the key right there: unique.  While Fury certainly isn't the best movie in its vein of filmmaking, it is one of the most a-typical and, in many ways because of this, most rewarding.  This is chiefly because it approaches its subject from an aesthetic perspective rather than simply as a scenario to play out across the European theater.

Fury is hands down the most non-romanticized depiction of World War II to make it to movie theaters.  It exists not just as a narrative, but as a sardonic critique of films like Saving Private Ryan: "these aren't the guys defeating evil, these are the guys kicking evil's teeth in after its already lost."  You see corpses crushed underneath tank treads, shreds of faces clinging to the floor and legs and heads blown off by high-powered artillery with reckless abandon.

Although Fury relishes in the tropes and conventions of historical drama, it is in every fiber of its being an action movie.  The tank vs tank combat is both incredibly unique and satisfying among cinematic fight sequences: as immersive and exciting as it is pleasingly tactical.  The crew's last stand against an SS batallion at a profoundly disadvantagious crossroads is one of the best envisioned, staged and executed action scenes of the year: a year, mind you, which includes The Winter Soldier, Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Raid 2.

Despite all of its unflinching, unromantacized, muddied up grit, Fury's most lasting legacy will invariably end up being just out straight-up uncomfortable it is to watch.  The film is less about defeating the Nazi's, liberating Europe or even male relationships as it is about the monstrously dehumanizing effects of war upon the individual: the beastial homogeny of otherwise good men in extreme circumstances.

Norman Ellison, the audience surrogate who has somehow managed to go the entire war without seeing any combat, is systematically indoctrinated throughout the film into a consciousless killing machine: first by cleaning up his predecessor's leftover gore from his tank station (including the aforementioned face), then by the forced execution of an unarmed German prisoner (in which Brad Pitt's character puts the gun in Ellison's hand, aims and forces the new recruit to pull the trigger) and even the implicitly mandated rape of an innocent German girl found hiding under her bed.

The last of these is far seedier and more uncomfortable in practice than it doubtlessly was in theory.  But what, other than rape, can you call it when a member of a conquering army breaks into a girl's home, draggs her cousin from underneath her bed, taking her into the bedroom at gunpoint while his fellow soldier remains with the other woman, then forces himself upon her at the behest of his commanding officer?  By the end of the film, Ellison has transformed from a near pacifist into a blood-thirsty grunt, eagerly mowing down Germans with a machine gun while repeating the crew's maxim: "best job I ever had."

When push comes to shove, Fury is an important film among martial films set in World War II: deglamorizing what was undoubtedly a dark, viscious and dehumanizing experience.  And while this is often depicted in films depicting later wars (or "police actions"), I cannot think of a single other film to apply this tone and aesthetic to this particular conflict.

Rating:  7/10

Worth Buying:  Not quite

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