From a technical standpoint, it's good looking in some scenes, the special effects look good.

The story is very uneven, so I'll include a little lite spoiler warning.

For all the grim dialogue and attempt to portray a grim, bottomless sewer depicting total war the action sequences are more out of place, they feel like they belong in an action film, there's Rambo territory here. It rips off Saving Private Ryan in key moments, in fact one of the characters is the exact same character, you'll recognize him immediately.

The story tries so hard to manipulate the audience, it's transparent. There is so much orchestral theme music going on during the battles, which is what SPR avoided. For instance, the fighting actually quits during the middle of a battle so that characters can have their dramatic dialogue, the battle sounds may even completely disappear so they have a moment to talk, complete with theme music and that very typical female choir voice that sings that "whoaaaaaaaaaaa" and even piano music to try and convey sentimental feelings.

The final battle is boring, it's just not realistic. Based on the trailer I'm not surprised they went for that, based on critics' reviews I thought maybe my mind would be changed in that the film might be more realistic. But no, it's more like the trailer.

By the way, here are a couple of trailers I saw:

Ridley Scott is doing the story of Exodus. You can see his style in it.

Hardly surprising demographics report from the studio,


"Sony's marketing played up Fury's intense tank-on-tank action, which made it a strong option among male moviegoers. Unfortunately, the movie never really connected with women, who wound up accounting for just 40 percent of the audience on opening weekend. It also struggled with younger moviegoers: the audience was 51 percent over the age of 35."

There was a decent spread in the theatre I saw it- but the funny thing is, the audience reaction just didn't seem that connected it. The parts that were supposed to be funny no one was really laughing or anything.

There's not even that much tank vs. tank combat. It's difficult making a film that is centered around a tank, that's just a hard story to convey. Buttoned up doing nothing in such a cramped environment for a long time would not make for a good movie. So a lot of the story actually is the drama outside of the tank or when the crew is sitting around chatting and you get Brad Pitt's influence and perspective. It requires a strong character performance, which you got in places, but somehow it wasn't tied together good by the actual violence. Somehow it lacked something compelling.

Based on the trailer, I was hoping that it wasn't going to be a lone tank takes on the world, it was sort of not like that and sort of like that. I wrote in my spoiler tag why I thought the final act was anti-climatic and took away from the film a bit.

Mechanus you make good points on your show me.

Were any of you guys that watched it

I was thinking it was more of the political SS at the end, which were more true believers than the hardened fighters. A few of the histories I've read indicates that the quality of the SS units were much much degraded with a few fighters and a mix of old and young.

In a soldier town, except a few middle age wives toting along with their husbands, the girl I was with was the only female in the movie. Worse part was that after the movie she broke down having had one of close friends killed in front of her in Sh!tholestan. Yea, that wasn't my shining moment of "Let's spend a great evening together." I had never seen her memorial tattoo in uniform before.

Seen this on Friday, on the whole enjoyed it. The big downer about watching films in Belgium is the compulsory intermission, 45 minutes in and ...



really broke the connection with the characters.

Agree with most of what has been said about the scenes in the spoiler tags here.

Our local war memorial in Hechtel Belgium

and in the next town Leopoldsburg

Watched Fury on Saturday. Left the theatre with a slight "meh", not grim enough.
For what it is worth, I enjoyed the character played by the "The Walking Dead" fellow most, whatever his name is.

Cheers,
Slug

Wait, what? They stop the movie?? WTF kind of rule is that?
Whoever did it deserves to get a one hour special on CNN called "stupidest person on the planet alive today."



The Jedi Master

When I went to see Unknown the lady friend I had along went to pee during the 3 minutes where they explained the whole movie and plot about two thirds of the way in. I generally just hold it and squirm like a flailing idiot for the whole movie.

Intermissions are not a bad idea

I guess Belgium didn't read the memo on the fact that Hollywood films stopped having intermissions integrated into the story oh, about 45 years ago.

Even then it was usually 3 hour epics. When epics fell out of favor by by intermissions.

Yeah that's a good point. I have a few films on dvd that have the intermissions like Blue Max, Tora Tora Tora and Patton.

Ben Hur comes to mind... And that crappy Liz Taylor Cleopatra. Oh Spartacus.

I miss GOOD epics. Wish those would come back.

And we need them now. In the era that a small soda is like freaking 24 ounces of suger it would be nice to not be crawled over by folks making a run for the can. UGh... small should be no more than 12 ounces of freaking soda. Who buys a large it the movies? how can you drink that and not run for the can?

I really enjoyed it. Just one part, at the end, bothers me. I can't say because its a spoiler. I don't know how to use the spoiler alert. Thought it was good, though. Gonna pick it up on DVD when it comes out.

Just like bold or italicized text, insert brackets in your text beginning with spoiler and ending with /spoiler - if that makes sense.

Quote my post and you'll see what the text format below looks like:

I think the theme music and the female choir voice was a bit out of control for this film- all other very ridiculous plot elements aside, if nothing else I think even removing those would have helped a bit. On some occasions, it might work- for example, Oliver Stone didn't use it during battles in Platoon except on one occasion- to show Sgt. Elias' death in some kind of requiem during his Jesus 'crucifixition'. That was to convey a certain theatre going off into symbolism.

Here, they just use it just because there is a battle going on. Two different effects. That detracts from the cacophony and confusion of battle, and kind of beautifies it a bit. As a result, it makes things abstract and I feel removes the audience from it. Saving Private Ryan doesn't delude itself this way- people point out the documentary style cinematography as the high watermark of war films, but it's also the sound editing that works so well- without violins and choir voices laid over it, the sound combines with the visuals. Then you can have theme music during the breaks from fighting later.

I'll rent "Fury" from Netflix so I can judge for myself but it seems like "Fury" is pretty much a conventional Hollywood war movie complete with all of the necessary cliches.