If you haven’t seen the movie FURY yet, chances are this article will spoil a couple of things. I am posting this the same day it comes out, so I imagine that if you read it today, you’ll have something spoiled. I’ll do my best to not ruin anything, but there’s a chance. And with this movie being so good, I urge you to stop reading and start looking up showtimes.
Brad Pitt is the lead role, nicknamed “Wardaddy”. He leads a rag tag group of soldiers around Germany killing, you guessed it, Germans. It is a WW2 movie after all. He does a pretty damn good job at it too.
The plot revolves around the character later nicknamed sarcastically “Machine”, and his unwillingness to fight. He was sent to the army as Wardaddy’s back up driver after the guy he is replacing was, exploded in the tank. He mentions all the training he has had has been on the typewriter and he has never even seen the inside of a tank. He was only in the army for a short time, eight weeks I believe, and has never even seen a dead body.
As the movie progresses throughout a period of 24 hours we watch this innocent young man transform mentally into a read-for-war brute. Maybe that is an extreme word, but he sure does make a change. After witnessing many murders and seeing his own life come close to ending, he is forced to be ruthless. Wardaddy leads and teaches young Machine to be strong and get through it, noting a few times that it will all be over eventually.
The other tank-mates serve as emergency bully-big-brothers as they mock and torment the young Machine up until he finally breaks. Quickly after that, the biggest brother (they aren’t actually brothers, it’s a metaphor) apologizes and they make up. It was beautiful actually.
Wardaddy takes machine into a room of old Germans that have killed themselves, knowing the American’s were approaching. Machine asks why Wardaddy would bring him there, and all he says is, “Ideals are Peaceful, History is Violent”. I could not stop repeating this to myself so that I would memorize it. It is indeed a very interesting thought.
At one point the FURY tank squad is commanded to take a brief rest by the commanding officer, known solely as “The Old Man”. So they unstrap a bit and do just that. While in a small German town, Machine has relations with a young lady named Emma and they fall in love almost instantly. Isn’t it amazing how that works? Anyways immediately following that, with their guard still down the city is hit with an artillery strike. One of the rockets hits the house of Emma and Machine is forced to see her dead body without a chance to say goodbye. This was a major turning point that allowed Machine to snap into all-out-war mode.
I’ll leave the rest of the movie for you to watch. But I have some thoughts.
First of all if I may, I gotta say, this movie is amazing. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I watched the movie with a couple of my roommates who were equally as impressed.
Even with the Christian character, played by Shia Lebouf, nicknamed “Bible”, regularly doing Christian things and saying cool bible verses, we can make a few Christian applications of our own (also Wardaddy seemingly knows what he is talking about as well towards the end, very interesting).
Without digging deep or trying to make up a ton of application, I’ll just talk about one thing. You may have heard it talked about before but it is known as wartime versus peacetime mentality. As Christians, we are fighting in a spiritual war. But so many times we just rest. Like the characters above, as if we are in peacetime. We are not, and we should not act that way. Too often we are caught being early-movie-Machine, unwilling to fight, unwilling to listen, etc..
We must not drop our guard. We must be willing to fight.
Seriously, I love the verse that Bible (Shia Lebouf) quoted mid-movie,
Isaiah 6:8
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
This was a cool attitude that was demonstrated by the soldiers portrayed in this movie. How can we take on that same attitude?