Fury is a foul smelling, diesel guzzling, steel death trap. It’s also a new movie written and directed by David Ayer and starring Brad Pitt. The film is a rolling snapshot of the European theater in World War II and the men that fought there. What it is not is a war picture with a lofty purpose, like Saving Private Ryan, or one with a political motive, like The Hurt Locker. Fury is a gritty, gory story of five guys in a Sherman tank trying to survive the Great War. It’s simple.

Brad Pitt is Top Sergeant Don “War Daddy” Collier, a hard driving taskmaster who’s managed to keep his tank crew alive for years.  His crew: Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Grady “Coon-Ass”Travis (Jon Bernthal) and Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia (Michael Peña) are trapped with him in a WWII hell not of their own making. They are crawling through Germany in a tank that’s nearly helpless against the much more powerful German Tigers. They are crawling because Germany, at the order of Adolph Hitler, is fighting the allies for every foot of ground.  Enter Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a fumbling stenographer and typist, to fill out their tank crew. He is just as green as you might expect.

These characters are what makes Fury so special. There is very little character development, instead Ayer depends on archetypes. Look at nearly any WWII movie with Alan Ladd, John Wayne or Audie Murphy and you’ll see the same. My father was so good he could tell you in five minutes which character would be the hero, which the coward and which one would die. He was never wrong.

Yep, I could have told you what would happen with each member of the tank crew after I met them. Fury is so uncompromising in telling a good story that the background of the characters became secondary. This film is a journey from beginning to end, does it really matter what happened before? If you think so, demand a prequel!

Fury gave me the feeling I was an intimate…a member of the tank crew family, joining in as the group played, fought and even got drunk and obnoxious. That’s the importance of archetypal characters: it’s easy to match them to ones you’ve seen before and match them up.

This is not a movie about “guts and glory,” as some may suggest, but a movie about getting the hell back home in one piece. There is one exceptional moment when Don Collier sees a woman looking at the troops letting off steam in the town square. He takes the green tank driver, Norman, up to a pleasant apartment where they are greeted, not too pleasantly, by a woman and her cousin. Instead of what they expected, the Sargeant is just looking for a little hint of home. He finds it-an island of peace in an ocean of war.

The mistake is in making Fury more (or less) than it is. It’s a really good film, but it’s not about some grandiose scheme to win a war or destroy some foreign ideology. Fury is about squeezing as much out of life in a war and not getting dead. It’s also about killing so many Nazis that there are none left to kill you. George S. Patton once said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” I never got a sense in the movie that anyone gloried in taking life. It was only expedient to kill the “other bastard.”

Ayer’s direction and Brad Pitt’s acting certainly headlined the piece, but everything in the film was top notch. Even the now familiar, “This is the best job I’ve ever had,” from the tank crew, fits. I would strongly suggest seeing Fury in the theater. The action and explosions are just too good to miss on the big screen.

Rating 4 Stars out of 5!