Pun Salad

Fury! Alas, not about the wartime exploits of Sergeant Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos. Here, it's a word painted on the cannon barrel of a WWII tank commanded by Brad Pitt.

It's set in the closing days of the war in Europe, April 1945. There's still a lot of fight left in the Nazis, though. And the titles at the movie's beginning note that the Sherman M4 tanks used by American forces were outmatched by the Germans' Panzer/Tiger tanks in both offense and defense. Eek. (They ain't kidding about that either: A popular non-fiction book about the armored Army in WW2 is titled Death Traps, and the Amazon link is to your right.)

Brad and his longtime tank crew have been fighting in North Africa, France, and Belgium. But one of their gunners literally had his face shot off in their last battle, so into their close-knit group comes replacement Norman, an Army clerk-typist who's been forced into a combat role. Initial relationships are rocky; for one thing, the tank crew seems to have run out of patience with obeying the Geneva Conventions. (OK, they didn't exist until later, but you know what I mean.)

To enjoy this movie, you can get overly disturbed by (as the MPAA says): "strong sequences of war violence, some grisly images, and language throughout". War is Hell, and the movie is not shy about demonstrating that.

There might be some symbolism/deeper meaning stuff going on here. Someone over at IMDB insists that it's Moby Dick in a tank, but that stuff goes over my head.