It’s been over a decade since anything came close to being a great war movie….It’s 1945, World War II when the film opens, and Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) commands a Sherman tank of five men in Nazi Germany. But this isn’t Pitt’s movie, it’s instead told through the perspective of his claustrophobic tank, and the eyes of young Norman (Logan Lerman) a rookie soldier who was a desk clerk typing 90 words a minute before recruitment.
Instantly we are one of Wardaddy’s soldiers. Feeling their fear…their angst…men at war. And their anger. Each man has a true sense of character, agenda and individual identity (the Italian, the Jew and the Wasp etc.). Each so flawlessly executed in a script by the writer/director David Ayer. Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (Shia LaBeouf) gives a tortured performance that is Best Supporting Actor worthy. Gordo (Michael Pena) is determined and exhausted, and Grady ‘Coon Ass’ Travis (John Bernthal) is an out-of-control soldier grasping for the meaning of war as he fights his inner demons. Each also struggles with one common factor,..the minimal exhale space between battles.
Wardaddy has killed Germans in Africa, in France and now in Germany….his tank is his home. War will end “but before it does, a lot of people gotta die.” The tank becomes human…going from Trojan Horse to becoming one of the boys.
An almost religious collaboration of performance, musical score and visuals that puts us in the trenches, Ayer’s film gives us pause as to how and why the man who wrote The Fast and the Furious could rise to such sophistication.
Everything Pitt does turns to gold these days….he’s evolved from the days of Se7en to World War Z, 12 Years a Slave, and now this. Move over George Clooney, this is the level of sophistication of what Monuments Men should have been. A masterpiece in every sense of the word, this generations’ Saving Private Ryan. Expect nominations all around for every Oscar category.