Fury: Movie Review

Illustration created with brush markers and white color pencil on Post-it Note and color adjusted with OS 8 photo filters. © 2014 by O. Douglas Jennings

I came into the theater to watch the film Fury with the personal agenda of wanting to connect with the experiences of my late dad (d.1993) who was a WWII vet (82nd Airbourne). All the while I was growing up, he often seemed to me to be haunted by his war experience. As I watched the movie, I felt that, through the eyes of the young recruit, Norman, I could understand, in small measure, what my dad might have went through as a soldier immersed in war. Dad was 18 when he entered the war and would have been 23 by the time the events in Fury take place. He wouldn't have been as green as the young man in the movie by that point. But I have the sense that the traumatic events and transformation experienced by Norman in the time frame of the film incapsulate the overall war experience of my dad to some extent.

Even though my personal predisposition to identify with the story might have favorably skewed my impressions, I think the film was excellent. I would rank it as high in quality with one of my all-time favorite films, Unforgiven. Fury showed the brutality of war yet also it's humanity. It had tremendous heart and great performances by Brad Pitt and the other actors with captivating onscreen chemistry between them. 

It's likely that a target audience for Fury is baby boomer children of WW2 vets. I've read reviews by younger film buffs and they feel the story is not as cohesive as it should have been. But my take, as I watched and remembered the few war stories my dad reluctantly told me over the years, was that this fictional account of a brutal war rang true and held the narrative well.

2018 UPDATE: Found an excellent Docu-Graphic presentation at The Nib that helped me understand why Fury was not well-liked by some WWII buffs. It does not glorify war in a way that has become all too popular. Read this excellent comic: