Fury - a single-scene movie?

This is a film that was being very heavily advertised before it came out, and so with a couple of days off work and given my insatiable interest in all things WW2, I had to go and see it the week before last.  First time going to the Ilford Cineworld for quite a few years.  Don't really use Cineworld ever as there are several other chains much closer to Reading.  There's not really much to say about it though, it's pretty much the same as all the other multiplex cinemas out there, except you still buy your tickets from an actual ticket desk rather than the bit where you get your popcorn.  Nice.

So - Fury eh?  The basic premise is that Brad Pitt is an ace tank commander at the back end of the Second World War.  Him and his unit are operating in the chaos that is Western Germany in April 1945, as the Nazi regime is falling apart and only fanatical groups of isolated SS troops are operating causing chaos as the Americans advance.  They crew a Sherman tank, a vehicle that was mass-produced in the US and though somewhat inferior to the modern German Tiger tanks, won many battles through sheer weight of numbers.  It is a battle like this that forms one of the centre-pieces of film, when Brad Pitt's tank (named Fury) and 3 other battle a Tiger.  Only by presenting the Tiger with more targets than it can shoot before they get into point blank range, do they have any chance of victory.

It is this scene that forms the central part of the movie.  With the rest of the film lacking much in the way of a plot or character development or anything really, it feels like the whole point is to bring the modern age of Saving Private Ryan-style visuals inside the cabin of a tank. Such gritty realism has become standard for any film depicting infantry combat since around 2000, and it's about time someone shifted that brutality into the world of tank combat.  All fair enough, but it's not really enough to get 90 minutes of film out of.  One scene in particular that feels like out-of-place filler involves Brad Pitt and his green co-driver hanging out in a flat in a recent-conquered German town.  They sort of play house with the women in there for a bit, pretending to be normal in a scene that goes on for what feels like 20 minutes and doesn't really do anything apart from slow the pace of the film down.

I guess this scene is meant to contrast the horrors of war against the ordinariness of everyday life, or perhaps it's some other well-worn war film trope like the grizzled gritty soldiers freshly-off the front being bamboozled by the appearance of cleanly-dressed women.  There are a lot of war clichés on display in Fury.  Shia Lebouf plays a preacher always quoting the bible and describing himself as "god's instrument of death".  Michael Pena is the Mexican one one in the tank, cue jokey tension about where his loyalties really lie.  The film also feels the need to end on a last-stand scene which - though containing amazing visuals - is totally mental and makes the German army look like a bunch of morons lining up to be dispatched by American bullets.

So I'm going to recommend Fury, but with a big caveat - which is that it's almost entirely about the visuals and the visceral realism of tank combat in WW2.  It's a film that wouldn't have been out of place as a documentary on the History channel.  Don't go into it expecting a film that re-writes the rules of the war film genre, or even has much in the way of characters; just go into it hoping to learn something about what it was like to be in a tank in WW2.