FURY

I remember clearly the day war changed forever – at least in the cinema. It was mid-September 1998 and I was in the Odeon, Edinburgh, watching Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. After a brief present-day prologue, the film opens on D-Day and with one of the most disturbingly memorable scenes in film history.

Of course, there had been gruesome, harrowing and downright bloody war movies before Saving Private Ryan. But this was different. It was relentless, disorientating, deafening, terrifying. It transported you straight on to shell-shocked, blood-soaked Omaha Beach. And you couldn’t look away.

Brad Pitt’s much-anticipated Second World War film is born of the same pedigree. But while Spielberg softened his picture with a reasonably detailed, slightly sentimental plot, Pitt’s Fury is as intimidating and as uncompromising as the approaching thunder of a Tiger tank. It is also blindingly good.

War, perhaps, is no place for provisos and health warnings, but it seems only fair to include one here: Fury is a very violent film. It is a movie about battle and shuns none of its terrors. Worse still, for the squeamish at least, the gore is blisteringly realistic.

We join the plot, such as it is, in April 1945. The Americans are ploughing across a muddy, broken Germany, but Hitler’s fanatics fight on, the last rabid remnants of Nazism. War, as the film’s poster warns, never ends quietly.

Especially not for Brad Pitt’s character, Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier, the grizzled, cynical commander of a Sherman tank named Fury. Along with crew members Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (an excellent Shia LaBeouf), Trini (Michael Peña), Grady (Jon Bernthal) and pea-green newbie, Logan (Norman Ellison), he is tasked with a series of increasingly suicidal missions against an enemy that should have given up the ghost months ago. Atrocities are committed by both sides; souls are searched and are often found to be empty.

Story-wise, that is about it. But Pitt and his co-stars all put in memorable performances. Yes, occasionally they try a little too hard to be hard men in a hard war, but it’s impossible not to empathise with their characters, even when they do, every now and then, teeter on the cusp of caricature. In fact, director David Ayer even succeeds in bringing the hulk of pock-marked metal that is Fury to life; a sort of Second World War Herbie with a personality all its own.

Indeed, when Fury and her crew encounter a vastly better armoured and armed Tiger tank (played by the only operational Second World War Tiger left in the world), it is impossible not to cross your fingers, clench your teeth and wince your way through every agonising exchange.

Many will argue that Fury is too nihilistic, too bleak. But on balance, it remains tough but essential viewing, especially as Remembrance Day approaches.