DVD: Fury

"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred Sherman – thanks to some hard-slog dawn-to-dusk training and conversations with 90-year-old veterans of the US 2nd Armored Division.

The actors (including Shia LeBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña) seem sincere as they describe how the experience gave them some insight into the true nature of warfare, and blood brothers is what they felt like afterwards.

It's a theme that obviously fascinates director David Ayer. His 2012 drama End of Watch zoomed in on two LAPD cops as they prowled the streets in their patrol car, bonding intensely as they confronted a daunting menu of gang warfare and violent crime. Essentially, Fury isn't so different – it's five guys in a tank, slogging across a bleak and morbid Germany in the final weeks of the war, knowing hostilities must end soon but also aware that they may never make it that far.

It's visceral, action-packed and gruelling, and sometimes seems to touch on moments of genuine insight into the state of mind of soldiers who have slugged it out from North Africa to northern Europe, suggesting that a fatalistic acceptance of death is the only way to get through such a fundamentally incomprehensible experience. Brad Pitt plays it strong and silent as tank commander Don "Wardaddy" Collier, a kind of hard but fair patriarch to his team. He's trying to beat some harsh reality into the naive skull of Norman (Logan Lerman), who's been assigned as a replacement crewman despite, oddly, having no prior experience in tanks. "Ideals are peaceful. History is violent," says Collier, who has no compunction about shooting SS prisoners on the spot. Nonetheless Ayer's crew are God-fearing boys who frequently find solace in quoting the Scriptures, as their real-life forebears doubtless did.

The combat scenes are scarily convincing. The best bit is a panicky close-quarter battle between the Sherman and a German Tiger, where the Americans have to apply some lateral thinking to the problem of overcoming the vastly superior enemy machine. It's the denouement which lets it down, settling for a slightly silly Alamo-style stand-off featuring one maimed tank versus swarms of Germans. But Fury still belongs firmly in the upper echelon of war movies. 

Overleaf: watch trailer for Fury