Fury - is this bloodthirsty film really what this generation deserves? - The Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article4237813.ece
Brad Pitt’s war epic is an ultra-violent odyssey. If each era is defined by a war movie, what does Fury say about ours?
It’s one of those memorable lines of dialogue. Oddly prophetic, mysterious and clearly burdened with the weight of meaning. It is spoken by Shia LaBeouf as tank operator Boyd “Bible” Swan in the early scenes of Brad Pitt’s new big budget Second World War action fest, Fury.
“Wait until you see it,” says the battle-hardened Swan, staring blankly into the eyes of new recruit Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). “See what?” answers the baffled and bookish newbie. Swan sighs, half-smiles and finally answers: “What a man can do to another man.”
Mere moments after this exchange the film that erupts on screen (Ellison joins a five-man tank unit under the command of Pitt’s Don “Wardaddy” Collier and they fight Nazis behind enemy lines) is very much a blistering illustration of Swan’s teasing invocation. For the things that men do to other men in Fury will certainly bring audiences to the edge of their seats, set horror fans’ hearts a flutter - and will inevitably send others reaching for the sick bags.
Heads explode, limbs are blasted apart, faces shot to bits, throats slit open and, in a telling mood-setter during the opening frames, Wardaddy (he’s a father figure, geddit?) repeatedly stabs a fallen Nazi through the eye socket. It’s no wonder that the title of the film, when it appears dramatically on screen in blockish type face, is coloured vivid crimson.
Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt and Michael Peña in Fury
Pitt as Wardaddy
October 16 2014 AP
The gore, of course, is vital to the movie, say the filmmakers. Both director David Ayer (he wrote the Oscar-winning Training Day and directed this year’s Arnie-flop Sabotage) and fellow producer Ethan Smith have claimed that they are making one of the first movies to really address the inhuman brutality of the Second World War and a film that doesn’t look to the often squeaky-clean history of Hollywood movies for inspiration.
“David would talk about how in the late 1940s, when Hollywood started making movies about the Second World War, the die was cast for a clean look,” Smith has said. “What David wanted to do was not reference cinematic history, but real history.”
The 46-year-old Ayer was thus meticulous in his ambitions for the realism of Fury. A veteran himself (he joined the US Navy at 18 and served for two years in a nuclear submarine), he claimed that this intimate tale of men under pressure would be a personal journey. He wrote the script quickly. “It sort of exploded out of me,” he said (an appropriate metaphor for the film to follow).
Three veterans of real Sherman tank units were consulted over the details, although one of them, Don Evans, recently suggested that the events depicted in the film might have been a bit more extreme than his memory of them - “I don’t recall anyone having to kill a buddy,” he said. Meanwhile, Ayer pored over hours of US Signal Corps footage, analysing every detail, says Smith, “of how the men would walk, carry their weapons, approach a mission or relax at the side of the road”.
Pitt - with the bullet whistles of Inglourious Basterds (2009) still ringing in his ears - joined the project, which was budgeted at $80 million. By September the cameras were rolling in the fields of Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire (both standing in for the rural German countryside and both reasonably close to the Tank Museum in Bovingdon from where two of the film’s real stars, a Sherman tank and a German “Tiger” tank, were borrowed). And yes, the 12-week shoot was intense.
And yes, the actors were all drilled by a military advisor (two actually: Kevin Vance and David Rae). And yes, the rumour is true: LaBeouf did scar his own face for realism. And yes, the report is true, a stuntman was stabbed in the shoulder by an actor with a bayonet (the actor mistook the stuntman for a dummy - no jokes please). And yes, LaBeouf didn’t wash for the entire duration of the shoot. And yes, this all results in a film that’s positively dripping with sweat, grit and gore, that’s grimly claustrophobic and thrillingly propulsive in equal measure - but is it a ground-breaker? Is it a revolutionary approach to the Second World War on film? Is it Oscar-worthy?
In a word, no. And certainly, with the awards season almost upon us again, that other serious Second World War-themed Oscar contender The Imitation Game will breathe a sigh of relief in the face of Fury, like the proverbial specky British nerd squaring up to the lumbering and slightly dim American sports jock. For there is very little that’s revolutionary on display here. It’s a film that, as Ayer correctly claims, disconnects itself from a long history of traditional war movies, from The Longest Day to The Bridge on the River Kwai to Saving Private Ryan (yes, the latter movie is gore-drenched but unlike Fury it’s also rigid with moral values).
Yet the disconnection is so complete that Fury at times comes close to free-floating anarchy. It’s telling, and troubling, that in the climactic battle scene the Nazis appear mostly in silhouette, like movie zombies rather than flesh-and-blood participants in a far-reaching and era-defining ideology. The political context for the movie, and for the Second World War, is almost entirely absent.
In fact this is not really a film about the Second World War at all. It is about five men shouting at each other inside a metal box in between regular bouts of mass evisceration. The messy and specious narrative dynamics owe everything to the Call of Duty video game and nothing at all to the complexities of so-called “real life”.
In his comprehensive study Evolution of the War Film Genre: From Westerns and World War II to Vietnam, Pete Mason argues: “The temperament, emotional stance and political leaning of each era of war films offer a window into the mindset of the country at the time.” If this is true - and, well, it is (although I’d replace “country” with “culture” because we’re all involved and all implicated) - what does it say about the culture that produces Fury?
Perhaps, in our punchy, bitey, context-free, instantaneous live-die-repeat video-game world, this, at last, is the war movie we deserve. Or maybe it’s just bloody good fun and a chance to see once and for all what men can do to other men.
Fury is released on October 22
Brad Pitt’s war epic is an ultra-violent odyssey. If each era is defined by a war movie, what does Fury say about ours?
It’s one of those memorable lines of dialogue. Oddly prophetic, mysterious and clearly burdened with the weight of meaning. It is spoken by Shia LaBeouf as tank operator Boyd “Bible” Swan in the early scenes of Brad Pitt’s new big budget Second World War action fest, Fury.
“Wait until you see it,” says the battle-hardened Swan, staring blankly into the eyes of new recruit Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). “See what?” answers the baffled and bookish newbie. Swan sighs, half-smiles and finally answers: “What a man can do to another man.”
Mere moments after this exchange the film that erupts on screen (Ellison joins a five-man tank unit under the command of Pitt’s Don “Wardaddy” Collier and they fight Nazis behind enemy lines) is very much a blistering illustration of Swan’s teasing invocation. For the things that men do to other men in Fury will certainly bring audiences to the edge of their seats, set horror fans’ hearts a flutter - and will inevitably send others reaching for the sick bags.
Heads explode, limbs are blasted apart, faces shot to bits, throats slit open and, in a telling mood-setter during the opening frames, Wardaddy (he’s a father figure, geddit?) repeatedly stabs a fallen Nazi through the eye socket. It’s no wonder that the title of the film, when it appears dramatically on screen in blockish type face, is coloured vivid crimson.
Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt and Michael Peña in Fury
Pitt as Wardaddy
October 16 2014 AP
The gore, of course, is vital to the movie, say the filmmakers. Both director David Ayer (he wrote the Oscar-winning Training Day and directed this year’s Arnie-flop Sabotage) and fellow producer Ethan Smith have claimed that they are making one of the first movies to really address the inhuman brutality of the Second World War and a film that doesn’t look to the often squeaky-clean history of Hollywood movies for inspiration.
“David would talk about how in the late 1940s, when Hollywood started making movies about the Second World War, the die was cast for a clean look,” Smith has said. “What David wanted to do was not reference cinematic history, but real history.”
The 46-year-old Ayer was thus meticulous in his ambitions for the realism of Fury. A veteran himself (he joined the US Navy at 18 and served for two years in a nuclear submarine), he claimed that this intimate tale of men under pressure would be a personal journey. He wrote the script quickly. “It sort of exploded out of me,” he said (an appropriate metaphor for the film to follow).
Three veterans of real Sherman tank units were consulted over the details, although one of them, Don Evans, recently suggested that the events depicted in the film might have been a bit more extreme than his memory of them - “I don’t recall anyone having to kill a buddy,” he said. Meanwhile, Ayer pored over hours of US Signal Corps footage, analysing every detail, says Smith, “of how the men would walk, carry their weapons, approach a mission or relax at the side of the road”.
Pitt - with the bullet whistles of Inglourious Basterds (2009) still ringing in his ears - joined the project, which was budgeted at $80 million. By September the cameras were rolling in the fields of Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire (both standing in for the rural German countryside and both reasonably close to the Tank Museum in Bovingdon from where two of the film’s real stars, a Sherman tank and a German “Tiger” tank, were borrowed). And yes, the 12-week shoot was intense.
And yes, the actors were all drilled by a military advisor (two actually: Kevin Vance and David Rae). And yes, the rumour is true: LaBeouf did scar his own face for realism. And yes, the report is true, a stuntman was stabbed in the shoulder by an actor with a bayonet (the actor mistook the stuntman for a dummy - no jokes please). And yes, LaBeouf didn’t wash for the entire duration of the shoot. And yes, this all results in a film that’s positively dripping with sweat, grit and gore, that’s grimly claustrophobic and thrillingly propulsive in equal measure - but is it a ground-breaker? Is it a revolutionary approach to the Second World War on film? Is it Oscar-worthy?
In a word, no. And certainly, with the awards season almost upon us again, that other serious Second World War-themed Oscar contender The Imitation Game will breathe a sigh of relief in the face of Fury, like the proverbial specky British nerd squaring up to the lumbering and slightly dim American sports jock. For there is very little that’s revolutionary on display here. It’s a film that, as Ayer correctly claims, disconnects itself from a long history of traditional war movies, from The Longest Day to The Bridge on the River Kwai to Saving Private Ryan (yes, the latter movie is gore-drenched but unlike Fury it’s also rigid with moral values).
Yet the disconnection is so complete that Fury at times comes close to free-floating anarchy. It’s telling, and troubling, that in the climactic battle scene the Nazis appear mostly in silhouette, like movie zombies rather than flesh-and-blood participants in a far-reaching and era-defining ideology. The political context for the movie, and for the Second World War, is almost entirely absent.
In fact this is not really a film about the Second World War at all. It is about five men shouting at each other inside a metal box in between regular bouts of mass evisceration. The messy and specious narrative dynamics owe everything to the Call of Duty video game and nothing at all to the complexities of so-called “real life”.
In his comprehensive study Evolution of the War Film Genre: From Westerns and World War II to Vietnam, Pete Mason argues: “The temperament, emotional stance and political leaning of each era of war films offer a window into the mindset of the country at the time.” If this is true - and, well, it is (although I’d replace “country” with “culture” because we’re all involved and all implicated) - what does it say about the culture that produces Fury?
Perhaps, in our punchy, bitey, context-free, instantaneous live-die-repeat video-game world, this, at last, is the war movie we deserve. Or maybe it’s just bloody good fun and a chance to see once and for all what men can do to other men.
Fury is released on October 22