“Fury- Heart of Steel” in cinemas – frenzy of killing – Süddeutsche.de

The new movie “Fury” must Brad Pitt inking the image of American liberators in World War II. But then takes the upper hand aesthetics of war.

By David Steinitz

On his first day, the young American soldier must first Norman times to clean the remnants of his predecessor from the tank. That it caught in a bombing, thrown into the interior of the tank and there spread to the inner walls

Norman (Logan Lerman) is actually Army recorder, designed to type 60 words per minute -., Only in the last weeks of the war in the spring of 1945, every man for battle through muddy German hinterland towards Berlin needed. The defeat of the Germans has long been in sight, but on the battlefields and in the villages burn the Nazis a few thousand young people and seniors to make the Allies to invade as painful as possible. This disaster gets Norman, with laundry tub in hand, yelling told by his new boss. The same name as he is, his nickname is “Wardaddy,” and Brad Pitt plays him with his fiercest expression: “I killed Nazis in Africa, France and Belgium, now I kill just Nazis in Germany!”

Also, the tank has a nickname: “Fury” frenzy. That is the original title of the film, and so have the guys gekrakelt in white letters on sooty armored conduit. In Germany, probably someone had a poetic moment of rental, here called the film “Heart of Steel”. This is a little war cheesy, but holds together well, what does a director and screenwriter David Ayer negotiate while blood and guts splash, as violent as you rarely get to see it in mainstream cinema: Can a human cruelties and indignities of war endure without corrupted and become deformed?

mystification for the American conscience

This may to European ears sound pretty naive, only one has to consider that the Second World War in the United States many sites is still considered the war, from which American soldiers are all marching out as shining heroes and liberators. A mystification was having all the following wars and the shock news of atrocities committed by the US Army, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, increasingly necessary for collective American conscience

But Wardaddy and his four men of the 2nd Armored Division. – even the first so timid Norman – contribute in the first half of the film a good part of the overall horror as they thunder with her M4 Sherman -Panzer of coff coff and to the last resisters executed. Nevertheless, in the United States was “Heart of Steel” quite a showstopper, the fourth most successful film of the Sony Studios in 2014, and that’s saying something, of course, with such a big player. Nevertheless – that you have to say in this case. Not only because the film scratches in old heroic myths, but because he is also advised rather schizophrenic in its further course.

David Ayer has already made some pretty impressive films. For example, he resuscitated as the author of “Training Day” and director of “End of Watch” the genre of tough cop thriller with a rawness and directness that are rare in the major Hollywood studios. But you can not escape the feeling that this time he does not trust his own story so well. For with the same pleasure with which he initially operates its demystification of the US Army, he delights from the half calmly on the aesthetics of war and pans from the grueling shake close-ups of his soldiers in the tank inside on the large panorama: the Bomb Squad and their white vapor trail in the shimmering red sky at sunset; the tanks, which he in his staging any clumsiness of their 30-ton existence takes to make them revolve around each other in almost erotic courtship choreography in the fight and shoot -. great overpowering cinema

And as if these bombastic make pictures just with the man who has directed it, a kind of brainwashing, Ayer finally pays homage to the last third of the film precisely those patriotic victory poses and those packaged in camouflage macho coolness, he has initially denounced so didactic. Since defend his five boys break their armor driven at an intersection against a 300-man unit of the Waffen-SS. To encourage it shows the last bottle of brandy and edification slogans that could have come straight from the recruiting offices in the home.

Fury USA 2014 – Director, Writer: David Ayer. Camera: Roman Vasyanov. By: Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Bernthal. Sony, 134 minutes.