Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal, Jim Parrack, Brad William Henke, Kevin Vance, Xavier Samuel, Jason Isaacs, Anamarie Marinca, Alicia Von Rittberg, Scottv Eastwood, Laurence Spellman, Daniel Betts, Adam Ganne, Eric Kofi-Abrefa, Osi Okerafor, John Macmillan, Saul Barrett, Marek Oravec, Kyle Soller, Jake Curran, Jack Bannon, Branko Tomovic, Orion Lee, Vivien Bridson, Christian Contreras, Stella Stocker, Jacob Vonhendial, Lukas Rolfe, Leon Rolfe, Harry Hancock, Daniel Dorr, Bernhard Forcher.
War is Hell they used to say. Sitting through a representation of one can be just as chilling and soul torturing but in some cases that representation needs to be seen, if only to remind yourself that the spectres and horrors of the past can still be seen scuttling in plain sight today. The very real danger of sleep walking, not even that in some cases as there are those quite willing to run with arms outstretched, towards the extreme nature of political thought is one that haunts many a dream. If War is Hell then Fury is a place in which nobody should ever find themselves.
Fury is the latest in a long line of films that have turned the cinematic demonstration of war into a moralistic but graphic tale. This in itself is fine and unobjectionable as war by its very nature changes people, it eats away at the soul of all who fall into in to its clutches and Fury displays that fear perfectly.
The film benefits from having Brad Pitt in the lead as Sergeant Don Collier but also with two actors in parts that might seem an unnatural home for their special breed of acting. For Shia LaBeouf in the role as the scripture loving and God fearing Boyd Swan, he seems to have reached the potential he has shown glimpses of for years but seemed to always to be hemmed in by more cinematic appealing roles in which popularity was assured by audiences. His performance is gritty, at times disturbing but nonetheless compelling. For Logan Lerman, he is the real star turn of the film, the senselessness of the situation, the encroaching anger at the Nazi and S.S. Brigade which used shamefully women, children and old tired men who were barely able to lift their walking stick let alone a weapon, was to see a boy become, if not a man, then a machine with a conscious. Brad Pitt may have been the selling point of the film but it is Logan Lerman, who alongside Alicia von Rittberg as Emma, captured the very heart of the film’s message.
Fury is one of those films, that despite the gore and truthful representation of the human carnage and violent nature of war, that you just cannot turn your head away from. The symbolism of infectious hate and vehemence that carries from one person to other is as rapid and dangerous as pestilence in an unsanitary population. The final despairing act of the tank company is one in which rivals in parts the closing section of Saving Private Ryan. The nods to Steven Spielberg’s epic are on screen for all to see. The film makes no hidden pretence that war is hell, in fact so hellish in Fury that the Devil might be under investigation for underselling his particular branch, that war is nothing more than the ability to have a better aim and more noble ideas but peppered with the bleak uncertainty that your head is still going to be attached to your neck in the next minute.
If truth in warfare is what is required, the visualisation of what a bullet can do, what a shell or grenade can achieve on its way to destruction, then Fury is the right film to see. There is no window dressing, no scenario is which nothing but obviation is on offer and yet the film delivers on almost every count possible.
Fury isn’t a masterpiece like Saving Private Ryan but it stands head and shoulders above else in the last ten years where the unseemly nature of war, the disposability of human life and the destructive nature of humanity is revealed to its fullest.
Ian D. Hall