FURY
Director & writer David Ayer
Cert 15 134 minutes
This is not a profound film.
It is the fictional drama of a five man US tank crew in the last days of WWII in April 1945. ‘Fury’ is the name of their tank. The tank sergeant (Brad Pitt) is a battle-hardened soldier whose crew has fought the war all the way from North Africa into Germany itself. The action is gory and the language often unpleasant. This realism includes the portrayal of the absolute superiority of the German Tiger tank over the US Sherman. In some ways it is a ‘rights of passage’ film with the human storyline being a ‘father-son’ style interaction between the tough sergeant and a young and inexperienced gunner, ‘Norman’ (Logan Lermann), newly assigned to the tank and who must learn to kill.
‘Bible’
The film is of interest because one of the crew seems to have a real, though somewhat compromised, Christian faith. The first question ‘Bible’ Boyd asks the rookie gunner is: ‘Are you are praying man? Are you saved?’ (in contrast to just attending church). Isaiah 6 and 1 John 2 are used as encouragements to the crew at critical moments with even the sergeant joining in – though it is unclear whether this means something to him or he is simply using his Scripture knowledge as a source of inspiration for his men.
At least Hollywood (unlike the secular media in Britain) honours the place played by Christian faith in the lives of many WWII soldiers and that it underpinned their willingness to risk their lives for a righteous cause, which the battle against the Nazis clearly was. The Allies were not afraid to put ‘boots on the ground’ in the cause of freedom in those days.
