Fury

The Metal Coffin and the Mud

I've seen enough World War II movies to recognize the standard toolkit on sight: sunset light spilling over a battlefield, strings swelling nobly, soldiers speaking as if morality were simple and clearly labeled. David Ayer's *Fury* wants none of that. Set in April 1945, with Nazi Germany only weeks from collapse, it takes place after whatever romance war once pretended to have has already drained into the soil. What remains is mud, steel, and men so used up they barely resemble anything decent.



Ayer spent time in the Navy as a submariner before he ever started writing films, and that background is all over this movie. He understands the psychic damage of living for months inside a cramped metal machine with the same few men. The Sherman tank called "Fury" is more than transport; it is a closed, filthy habitat. The camera is constantly reminding us how little room there is, catching bodies scraping across greasy mechanisms or ducking under turret parts. When shells slam into the hull, the sound lands like a gigantic iron bell. You don't merely watch the crew fight. You sit in the noise with them.

The scene that has stayed with me most doesn't include a single blast. Midway through the film, Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) and Norman (Logan Lerman), the terrified typist abruptly reassigned as gunner, take over an apartment in a captured German town. Two local women are inside. Wardaddy behaves less like a conqueror than a man trying to remember civilization: hot water, a shave, a quiet meal. For ten fragile minutes, Ayer builds a pocket of domestic calm. Even Pitt's body softens; the hard slouch he carries inside the tank loosens into something almost paternal. Then the rest of the crew barges through the door.



They come in drunk, hungry, loud, furious at the tenderness they have interrupted. They shovel food into their mouths, leer at the women, and treat Norman with open contempt. It is one of the hardest scenes in the film to sit through. MaryAnn Johanson wrote at *FlickFilosopher* that the movie is "a particularly ugly iteration" of war making monsters out of men, "and I mean that as a compliment." That's exactly it. Ayer doesn't ask us to admire these men. He makes us watch them behave monstrously. The dining-room tension is thicker than anything in the battle scenes.

Then there is the crew itself. Much of the pre-release chatter centered on Shia LaBeouf's punishing method routine as the gunner nicknamed "Bible"—the tooth he pulled, the face he kept cutting, the refusal to bathe. Normally that sort of story feels like performance art around the performance. Here, reluctantly, I have to admit it lands. LaBeouf is excellent. He plays faith not as solace but as plating, something hardened over the soul so he can keep killing. When he quotes scripture, his eyes are stripped of the usual LaBeouf frenzy. He is frightening precisely because he is so still.



I don't think the film maintains that ugly precision all the way through. The finale turns into an Alamo-style last stand against an SS battalion, and suddenly the grim tactical realism Ayer has been cultivating bends toward studio-movie heroics. The Germans appear to forget basic marksmanship. Whether that feels like a ruinous compromise or just the sort of climax this genre always demands will vary from viewer to viewer.

Even so, *Fury* sticks. It does not want applause for these men. It wants you to reckon with the degrading price of what they were asked to do. When it ends, victory is the last thing on your mind. Mostly you want hot water and enough soap to get the mud off.