Brad Pitt loves playing in WWII movies. He loves fighting Nazis, who, incredibly, really existed, and were (if anything) even more evil than comes across on a movie screen. For 12 years, one of the most civilized, technologically and institutionally advanced countries on earth was ruled by a brutal, vicious band of thugs who employed racial mythology, sentimentalism, romanticism, emotion, intimidation, and murder in their attempt to extort as much wealth as possible from the populations they ruled. While not the worst catastrophe the world has ever witnessed, to put the Nazis in list terms (the only terms most people understand these days), we're probably talking one of the three all-time worst. Almost certainly bottom five, and indisputably bottom ten.

It's important to frame the list in terms of utility, or effectiveness, so as not to unintentionally make the case that this type of behavior is worthy of praise, or anything other than the most resounding condemnation and rejection. Oftentimes people confuse the intensity or degree of an action with its having some sort of value as an accomplishment, which is completely false. An evil accomplishment is not an accomplishment at all – only a fiend would claim different. Therefore, the Nazis and other misfortunes that humanity have inflicted upon itself such as other brands of totalitarianism or authoritarianism should never occupy the "top" of any list – only the bottom, where they belong.

Having established the terms of what we're talking about – which are critical to the debate – I wanted to weigh in on the topic of Fury again, in part because some people read my review and did not understand that I did watch the movie after writing the review based on previews. I watched it for two reasons: first, because when a woman says she wants to watch a war movie for a date, only a churl says: "no." Second, because I'd made the emotional if somewhat foolhardy claim that if Fury revealed anything new or fundamentally true about life or war by using different weapons than Saving Private Ryan, I'd boil and eat my leather shoe. I stood by that claim, but not without some trepidation as curtain time approached.

I should have trusted my gut. As composed, Fury was a confused series of cliches (many of which have been described elsewhere at great length) cobbled together around three competing assertions (contained within the protagonist): one, that the Nazis and specifically the SS were an antagonist of such manifest evil that to battle and kill them when and wherever possible was the highest possible good, two, that America and Americans were essentially different from the Nazis as expressed by the SS, a fact that explained or excused the actions of American soldiers within that context, and three that in war, people tend to develop tribes based on their unit – and in a tank, especially a Sherman tank, the weapon itself, the tank, becomes a part of the tribe – a living part of the unit.

Fury billed itself as a "realistic" movie, and a lot of the marketing surrounding the film concerned its attention to detail as well as the importance to the actors and studio that they "get it right," so it's worth discussing how the movie measured up based on those standards. Based on every reliable review I've seen from subject matter experts, the Germans and Americans were outfitted with equipment and weapons appropriate for the time, and those weapons functioned more or less as one would expect. The Americans aren't facing the Wehrmacht of 1941, they're facing militia reserves composed of children and old men, and the ineffectiveness of many German units in the face of American combat power (the missed shots, the shoddy equipment, etc.) can be explained as bad craftsmen misusing their tools. The deaths were realistic – people died characteristically realistically considering the medium, rather than unrealistically.

SPOILER

There is a scene with a Tiger tank that arrives with about 30 minutes left to go in the movie. One understands immediately that in a movie named for a tank, the Tiger will likely not destroy Fury and then rumble away as the protagonist (played by Brad Pitt), a troubled staff sergeant named Wardaddy, leads his crew to safety. The question becomes whether the American close air support (featured shortly before the tanks roll out) will show up and knock out the Tiger, or whether somehow Fury and the other tanks will outmaneuver the Tiger and knock it out, or some other plausible scenario, for example maybe Brad Pitt knows how to make sticky bombs like Tom Hanks. In a brilliant reference to the old GI Joe cartoons, where Cobras would unload battalions worth of firepower on the outgunned and outnumbered Joes, missing every time, the Tiger manages to destroy the other non-Fury tanks, then miss or score glancing hits (from point blank range with AP ammo) on Fury, until Wardaddy has maneuvered the tank behind the Tiger, and scores a direct hit seconds before the Tiger manages to miss again, or score another dramatic near-miss. 

BACK TO NON-SPOILER

The presentation of time-appropriate weapons and equipment, and the opening combat sequences, are all very well done, if on the melodramatic side. As time went on, though, the tactics, the strategy, how collections of people tended to move and work on an aggregate and specific level became less and less "realistic," while still purporting to strive for that standard. And this is a shame – if the movie had embraced the surreal, if it had let the "realism" go in favor of something more impressionistic, it could have avoided the absurd, cliched pitfall into which it ended up falling. Instead, it doubled down on its commitment to the narrative, the plot, and those three aforementioned competing assertions, which brings the Sherman tank, Fury, led by Wardaddy, to a crossroads that must be defended at all costs.

META SPOILER

Lest I be seen as a hater (someone who just criticizes success to make myself sound clever or fill some internal insecurity or bitterness), allow me to propose an alternative movie, which I found to be much closer to the truth about the horrors of war, (if less "realistic") – and which I proposed in my preview review of Fury – Cross of Iron.  In the end of Cross of Iron, a corrupt and ambitious Prussian Captain wants a Cross of Iron, and follows a heroic enlisted German soldier into a suicidal counterattack. This action occurs during a Russian assault in which the German unit is being overrun, and the action is remarkably even-handed – Russians and Germans are slaughtered indiscriminately, and heroic actions are presented as tiny tragedies. The protagonist and the Captain are fired upon – by a child – and the Captain can't figure out how to reload his submachine gun. The enlisted German soldier – Steiner, played brilliantly by James Coburn – sees this happen and begins laughing hysterically. The Russian child soldier is so disgusted by the Prussian's incompetence and desperation that he rolls his eyes rather than shooting again. The Prussian officer pathetically puts his helmet on backwards, still without having reloaded his submachine gun while Steiner laughs at the tragic absurdity of it all. From there, the movie cuts to the ending credits a series of stills of an execution carried out by Nazis, Steiner's laughter ringing in our ears. The credits are, collectively, one of the most powerfully damning pieces of evidence against the Nazis I've seen in any movie, ever.

I cannot stress enough how untrue and devastatingly inaccurate – unrealistic – any statement other than the one attempted by Peckinpah is. In order to make something real, there has to be something at stake. Fury wagers nothing, and presents the audience with a conclusion that's about as far from Cross of Iron as one could get.

META SPOLER COMPLETE – INITIATE SPOILER

At the end of Fury, the tank is disabled by a German anti-tank mine, cleverly placed in a piece of key strategic terrain. As it happens, Wardaddy's crew has been tasked with defending this terrain against a possible German counterattack – they are the only protection remaining between the Germans and an American resupply column. It is an afternoon in April, 1945. One of the tank's crew mans an OP, and discovers, with horror, that a full Battalion of adult male (i.e. veteran) SS panzer grenadier infantry is approaching down the road, singing, marching, panzerfausts at the ready – full of esprit de corps and savage intention, the kind we know is bad because they're SS.

Let's suspend disbelief – I'm sure it's possible such an event like this happened, even near the end of the war. I read a memoir by an SS infantry officer called Black Edelweiss which should be required reading for every young American male, as a cautionary tale of how propaganda and blind nationalism can lead even the best-intentioned young men astray. The author (writing for understandable reasons under the guise of a pseudonym) describes how his unit was shifted from the far north of Finland to Germany in January-February of 1945. Moving at night via ship, train, and foot to avoid being strafed or bombed, the unit was detected during an attack and strafed, bombed, and shelled nearly out of existence before seeing any enemy (American or British) soldiers. The survivors were then sent on a series of increasingly absurd missions, culminating, for the author, in a pointless and near-suicidal defense of a position with a single machine-gun against two Sherman tanks, which coincided with his injury and incarceration.

So this unit of SS infantrymen is moving in formation, singing, near the frontline, down a road, in a place where the Americans have aerial domination (uncontested access to the skies). It seems incredible – but maybe this is just a testament to confidence in their fighting prowess. The soldier at the OP runs back to tell Wardaddy about the situation – 300 enemy veteran soldiers, trucks, vehicles, kitted out to fight. Wardaddy's reaction is to announce that the others should return to the unit, but that he's carrying out the mission – he's manning Fury, staying with the tank, to repulse the Germans. The other American soldiers in the tank concur that this is a sound and reasonable plan, and they set about prepping for an ambush, in a scene that echoes the ending of Saving Private Ryan.

Now – the ambush and ensuing battle are relatively unimportant, and filled with the type of improbable and ludicrous cinematic excesses one would rightly expect it to contain. The crew guns down Germans as though they were pigeons; for their part, the Germans have inexplicably packed away the Panzerfausts they were carrying in cumbersome boxes. The SS has forgotten to fight, or perhaps never learned – something that would be slightly more believable if the unit were not filled with veteran adults, rather than cannon-fodder children. It's important, vital, even, to note here that every serious military analyst has credited Germany's early battlefield successes and long survival against impossible odds to a marked tactical superiority over their Russian, British, and American foes – the myth that German military success derived from technological superiority is a convenient invention of video game producers, Hollywood, and daytime television hucksters. The truth of the matter is that, outgunned, outproduced, and outmatched in almost every important category, the Germans held on because they outfought their enemies tactically almost everywhere, finding themselves bested occasionally by elite American units in areas like Bastogne, or by Russians at Kursk. Much of WWII was, for the Allies, a function of merely holding on, shelling the Germans with artillery and bombing them while our inferior soldiers made incremental gains against exhausted and increasingly ill-trained conscripts. This is not embarrassing or shameful – we won a modern war against a country attempting to fight along pre-modern lines (using human ingenuity against weapons). On top of which, the Nazis were, as described before, a pack of evil and unscrupulous bullies who needed to be stopped. So – to come back to the original point – Fury inflicts massive losses on the Germans, who continue to rush the tank rather than flanking it, or doing anything even the most basic military unit knows to do. As a combat-proven, valorously decorated former airborne infantry officer who has seen combat firsthand, I can say this without a shadow of doubt: in reality, the ambush and combat go down very differently from how they are portrayed in the movie.

When Brad Pitt's Wardaddy dies – shot twice, heroically, by a German sniper, then finished off by two grenades dropped into the tank by a final rush by the Germans (their fourth or fifth?) – he is presented like a figure in a painting by Titian or one of the old masters.

I've thought about why this must've been for some time, why none of it hung together. I mean, sure, anyone who has been to combat and knows how the thing works must find a movie like Fury condescending and trite. But why did the director and actors decide to play the movie this way? Why undercut the basic premise that the Germans were a serious, formidable foe? My hypothesis is that Hollywood has been producing these movies for so long that it has actually lost it's understanding of why or how the Nazis and SS were evil. Hollywood and popular culture – which have always placed more value on aesthetics and beauty than ideas, have become fascinated with the SS and Nazis as symbols of evil, but not as actually evil. So they pay lip service to the idea that the Nazis are horrible, and the SS are just the worst, and fail utterly to understand that the worst thing of all is human fanaticism, is bullying – the urge to destroy, divested of humanity, and invested with a purpose that confuses ends with means. The ends, for every combat veteran who's spent more than a few weeks in real combat, is (1) staying alive, and (2) helping keep one's buddies stay alive. The moment at which Wardaddy decides to stay with his tank, and is then absolutely fine with having his crew with him is the moment, for me, that the movie became both unrealistic and inaccurate, as well as untrue – in part due to Wardaddy's decision to damn his crew, and in part due to the way in which their efforts to stop the Germans were portrayed in valedictory terms, rather than under a mound of opprobrium.

Fury works when it's a movie about a German tank, filled with SS soldiers who are even at the end of the war and if somewhat skeptically in all practical terms, still committed to fighting and dying for their Fuhrer. Defending a crossroads against impossible odds? Check – the SS was famous for doing precisely that, even though it was stupid and pointless. Ambushing an American military unit many times its size, with the full weight of the U.S. military behind it, and the inevitability of artillery and air power once identified? Check – happened on more occasions than are worth recounting here. Fury is a movie about an SS tank, led by the German-speaking Brad Pitt, which is fanatically devoted to the proposition that the enemies of Germany must be stopped at all costs.

Otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. Worse, by allowing one of the Americans (the "good" one) to live, and by killing the others off heroically against impossible odds, Fury sends an awful and inherently misguided message about war, which contributes to the same tired old myth that helps lead America into foolish conflicts today. Good people understand when it is appropriate to head off to war, and do not need convincing – this myth of the necessity to throw one's life away for nothing is far beyond absurd – it is, in fact, obscene. I hope not to see more movies about World War II like Fury – perhaps it will be the last. It would be unrealistic of me to actually expect that, though.

Hollywood does not know how to make a film about war. This has been proven on so many different occasions, often averred on this blog, across the spectrum of time and experience, that I almost wonder why I’m bothering to write another essay on the subject. There are other projects I could be working on – short fiction, advocacy for responsible foreign policy, poetry, running. Developing personal relationships. Finding a useful pursuit beyond criticizing gross failures of imagination, when – to be perfectly frank – nobody’s listening, anyway.

When I watched the preview of Fury I immediately tweeted about it – words to the effect of “Saving Private Ryan with Tanks.” I have not watched the movie, as Michael Cieply did before reviewing it for The New York Times, but I’ve read his review, and combined with the two-plus minutes of preview I endured (several times), I feel confident delivering my reaction to the movie in full. Here’s me lifting my glass to the previewers, and Cieply, who seemed to feel pleased that the film was made, because I will not waste my money on it, it’s certain to be trash. Worse than that, the type of trash that deceives its watchers into thinking they’ve done something useful, or honored their grandparents, or I don’t know what.

Here are some excerpts from the beginning of his review: “Raw.” “The Good War this is not.” “Hero.” “Relentlessly authentic.” “Poised to deliver what popular culture has rarely seen.” “Executed prisoners and killed children.” Later on in the review, after exposition on the significance of a movie dedicated to the tankers, and the crews of Sherman tanks, “Much of what [Pitt’s] Wardaddy does may shocked viewers who have watched American soldiers behave brutally in Vietnam War films at least since ‘Apocalypse Now,’ but have rarely seen ugliness in the heroes of World War II.” “In his harsh initiation of a new gunner, Mr. Pitt’s Character crosses lines, both legal and moral. Not even Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum in Samuel Fuller’s ‘The Big Red One,’ another knife killer, went quite so far.”

“This time around, the subject will be those damaged tanker-heroes.”

Give me a break.

Without watching the movie, based on the preview, and The New York Times review, I’m going to head out on a limb and claim that if specific catalogue of carnage using different weapons than we’re used to reveals some epiphany about the horror of war, I’ll eat a leather shoe.

I’ll do it. So help me god, I’ll boil one of my leather shoes, and eat it.

According to the review, there’s a scene in the movie where someone from Wardaddy’s crew has to kill a “buddy.” A tank gunner vet quoted in the review claims that he didn’t see that type of behavior himself while serving 28 months overseas during WWII – one imagines that such events happened, even if they were exceptional. So what? There’s a great deal about how this movie isn’t Inglorious Basterds, although there’s another knife scene in it – presumably realistic, to show the grit of war, because according to the review (and the movie’s actors and makers), war is a series of physical actions more or less without negative consequence, unless you’re the person getting killed or stabbed.

A great deal of time is spent in the review on the writer/director, David Ayer, and his bona fides, as though that has anything to do with whether the movie is good, or accurate, or useful. Apparently Ayer has a man-cave in Los Angeles packed with war memorabilia. Apparently he himself served in the Navy during the 1980s, on a submarine crew. Apparently he reads lots of historical fiction and non-fiction accounts of World War II. Apparently any of that, combined with Brad Pitt, means he knows how to write and direct a “good” war movie worth watching.

It sounds like his movie sucks balls.

Here’s how Fury could maybe not be a movie that totally blows, and should never have been made (I’d be happy to eat that shoe if I’m proven wrong, because it will have been worth it to be wrong):

• The violence does not lead anywhere, and is seen visibly eroding good people and changing them in ways they do not like, and does them no good
• Combat is seen as a sequence of misfortunes, ideally misfortunes that befall the actor rather than the subject. Guns jam in comical ways. Soldiers shit themselves. People shake and weep. I’m guessing that Brad Pitt isn’t the sort of character (at least not if he’s being described as a hero) that he played in 12 Monkeys – batshit crazy, crying in the mayhem, barely able to function. No – I’m guessing he’s the guy who sticks knives into Nazi skulls, which everyone knows is cool.
• At least one of the soldiers should do something despicable – not like killing their buddy because they have to, to save him/her (unless it’s a major plot point), but because they enjoy it. I’d recommend the rape of someone vulnerable, say, a French or Jewish refugee. This should point to that character’s basic cowardice as a human being, a point underlined by their altruistic (not necessarily poor) performance in combat. It should go without saying that this soldier would be American.

At some point – maybe Saving Private Ryan – people decided that realistic portrayals of combat were socially useful because they were honest and brutal, and I assume that was supposed to dissuade people from wanting to experience war. If this is an idea that’s floating around in Hollywood, please allow me to argue vigorously against it. Many people I knew in the military (the two other primary contributors to this blog, Mr. Carson and Mr. James being definite exceptions) loved those movies, called them “badass,” and watched them over and over again. The weak secondary characters were disliked, and the enemies were hated. No deeper meaning was extracted from the films. Again – if Hollywood feels that making a realistic movie about tanks, or submarines, or bombers, or fighter planes, or black units, or white units, or Navajo units, or anything fighting Nazis and the SS and the commies is going to make young people feel revulsion toward war, or horror at its deprivations – they’re delusional. Fury will merely be added to a long list of factually probable representations of violence that help beat the drums for another generation of people to glamorize the worst parts of state-sanctioned murder, and prepare them to serve in misbegotten causes.

Which brings me to my final thought, and I’ve had this thought for a while: if the big Hollywood producers were interested in making a good war film about World War II, they could do a lot worse than reading 2666, meditating for a while, and then creating a film that takes Peckinpah’s superlative Cross of Iron and elevates it to the next level. Yes: I’m proposing that the best way to create a useful and accurate anti-war film would be to make the protagonists Germans – preferably German light infantry, the type that got chewed up on the Eastern Front with casualty rates somewhere above 1,000%, then was redeployed to the Western Front to fight the Americans and promptly bombed out of existence, for no good reason at all. The greatest mine for really good, true war stories, in my opinion, is the Wehrmacht – my guess is that nobody in Hollywood has the guts to put that movie together. After all, America’s about winning, and the Nazis were evil, and every German was a Nazi. And so we’ll continue singing ourselves to sleep at night with patriotic tunes on our lips, secure in our confidence that Brad Pitt and his buddies did what they had to because in the end, it was just a bad dream.