Fury: Spiritual Resistance in the Face of Dehumanization
[SPOILER WARNING: This review contains significant plot details and spoilers for the ending of Fury.]
Fury is not a comfortable film. It follows a five-man American tank crew in the final months of World War II, fighting their way deeper into Nazi Germany as the war collapses. It is violent, brutal, and relentless in its refusal to soften war into anything heroic or clean.
Watch it if you want to understand what war does to men.
As a witch, watching wasn’t about finding magic in the darkness. It was about witnessing soldiers cling to the shreds of humanity they had left—including spirituality. Granted, the film isn’t about religion or faith on the surface. But in this series, The Witch Watches, I want to look closely at war movies and shows to see the spiritual threads woven through American history. Fury is rich with them.
The Descent
When Norman joins the crew of the tank Fury, he arrives with something the others have long since lost: the belief that there is a clear line between right and wrong, between justice and survival. The crew recognizes it immediately because they no longer have it.
The tank is their world. Inside it, they are soldiers. Outside it, they become something else.
The film shows Norman’s transformation without flinching. The only indicator we get, to warn us of this violent descent, is Bible's haunting one-liner, "wait until you see it."
Norman is forced to kill, and he hardens day by day after that warning. The crew watches it happen—sees their own corruption reflected in his corruption. They cannot stop it. They can only witness it, and hate themselves for it. Hate the enemy, hate the war, and yet revel in their continued survival.
Top and his men have been shaped by relentless violence. They have seen too much. They have done too much. In that hardening, they have become unrecognizable to themselves, reduced to survival, to fury, to the momentum of war.
And yet, beneath the brutality, something else is happening—something the film refuses to name directly but shows constantly.
The Contradiction
The crew beats Norman nearly senseless. It is cruel. It is dehumanizing. And yet, as they march on, they protect him. They nest into each other in the tank—a cigarette passed hand to hand, a grim camaraderie in the, “best job they’ve ever had.” That intimacy is both grotesque and tender: comfort carved from chaos.
In one haunting scene, Norman plays piano for a German civilian. It is impossible beauty carved from horror—a fragile moment of human connection. The crew recognizes its fragility. Then they shatter it. They intrude, they violate—just as war has violated everything. Compassion and cruelty run side by side, and innocence cannot survive.
Here lies the truth of extremity: we can hold contradictory impulses simultaneously. The crew breaks Norman and tries to keep him alive. Both are true. Both coexist in the same men, sometimes in the same moment.
We see it again and again: Gordo shares his story while Bible weeps. The men rage against Top, resent his orders—then obey him, following him into fire. They rage and submit. They hate and serve. None of it resolves. These contradictions layer upon each other until the very end. You don’t watch this movie and eventually reduce the crew to monsters or saints—we see how they are both, sometimes at once.
The Reaching
What makes Fury spiritually significant is the constant reaching for something larger than themselves. Bible reads scripture. The men pray. They speak of meaning. They invoke God.
And they do this while being reduced to their basest selves, while doing things that contradict everything they claim to believe.
The film shows the gap between claim and reality: Bible preaches while the men mock, while they degrade, while they destroy. They reach for meaning while becoming unrecognizable to themselves. That tension is the point.
But the reaching matters. It is an act of resistance—not resistance that redeems them, not resistance that spares them, but resistance against surrendering completely to brutality. A refusal to believe they are only animals.
They are not striving for clear consciences or perfect faith. They are clinging desperately to a thread of integrity, to the idea that there is still something larger than survival. And in this, spirituality becomes not a shield, but a lifeline. Not a guarantee, but a reaching.
For a witch, this is recognizable: ritual and faith are rarely guarantees. They are acts of alignment, lifelines to meaning when nothing is promised in return.
The Cost
Eventually the tank breaks down at a crossroads—a symbol that in witchcraft represents decision, sacrifice, fate. Here, the machine that carried them through war becomes almost useless. It's almost like their reason for going on and on has also broken down; but when given the option to abandon the fight, they don't. They are surrounded, unarmed, about to die. But the reason isn't something concrete, it's not even something immovable or indomitable. It is abstraction itself that keeps them there, hunkered down and fighting on.
The crossroads as a locus of decision echoes both magical tradition and existential philosophy: we define ourselves in moments of irreversible choice, even when the outcome is annihilation.
The crew does what they have always done: they reach for each other, and they reach for God. They stand their ground—not because they had to, but because surrender was not an option. Even when power is stripped away, they assert their humanity by refusing to scatter.
Norman survives. And he is not okay. He is hardened, torn open. When someone calls him a hero, he cannot bear it. To him, survival is not heroic. It is loss. Survivorship often brings alienation rather than triumph—he embodies the cost of carrying death inside oneself. He leaves the crossroads with the expression that begs the question, what was the point of it all?
The Truth
The spirituality in Fury does not protect them from death. It does not guarantee victory, redemption, or moral clarity. It simply means they reached for it anyway, knowing it might not be enough.
This is the hardest truth the film offers: calling on something larger than yourself does not promise you will be spared. Standing firm does not mean you will not fall.
What matters is the act itself. The crew’s insistence on reaching, on choosing each other, on carving small moments of kinship out of violence—this matters not because it saves them, but because it tethers them to something beyond survival. It is how they remain men, not beasts. And we know that millions of people found this exact reason to fight on and even die in World War II. Because it was about something bigger than one person, yet boils down to the choice of the individual soldier. The choice of one soldier, to fight, to stand anyway, impacts the choices of the soldiers beside him. And the choices of soldiers fighting together impacts the war in rippling ways.
They are destroyed anyway. But they are destroyed as men, not as monsters. That distinction is everything—and it is also not enough. Humanity isn’t defined by victory or redemption, but by insisting on human dignity even when annihilation is inevitable.
I love how this movie highlights the paradoxes of survival, the need for compartmentalization. And yet when the camera zooms out, you see the exact impact of their choices. The hundreds of dead bodies around the tank.
If you kept zooming the lens out, looking at the war from a grander view, you'd see the "whole" and the "bigger thing" outside of it all. But we don't see that in Fury. We see the zoomed in, the tight angle, and the devastation in one survivor's eyes.
I don't have a perfect spin to make this witchy. It's war. We, today, are not at war. But I guess, in the comforts of today, I can see something distantly parallel. Even in simple, clean, and civil times we cling to ideals. In peace, we forget history. And I don't think any person can afford to forget or neglect the past.
We can't turn away from what connects us to the past and to the present, what connects us to each other. We can't ignore the nature we carry daily, save ourselves from reckoning with our beliefs and our intentions because the circumstances don't force us to. I think to do so, to neglect the lessons of history, is to incur a totally different type of moral injury.
I think Fury is existential. At its core, it wrestles with harsh questions: What does it mean to act when nothing guarantees meaning? What is the value of reaching for faith, for humanity, when it does not prevent destruction?
It's important that humans see what happen to each other, that we choose compassion over cruelty. That we lift our kin up rather than tear each other down. And that we value our integrity, our morality, our ability to choose, that we seek willingness to serve greater causes even in smaller, quiet ways. I think spirituality can be a coping mechanism, it's not just a moral compass or even a guarantee of anything.
This is why I’m writing The Witch Watches: not to glamorize war, but to witness its lessons. Because if ideals are peaceful and history is violent, then it’s on us to keep remembering, reckoning, and choosing. If you want to keep exploring these threads with me, subscribe to the blog and get my free grimoire pack following the Fool’s Journey.
Fascinating fact: Shia LaBeouf, who plays Bible, says he found the meaning of life while filming Fury, proudly proclaiming that he found salvation in the making this movie.
Watch It
If you are looking for easy answers, this is not the film for you. If you want to witness what happens to the human spirit in extremity—how brutality and compassion coexist, how reaching for meaning functions as resistance, what it costs to hold integrity when everything demands you abandon it—then Fury is waiting for you. Here is the trailer.
Watch it with open eyes. Sit with what you’ve witnessed. Because Fury does not offer comfort. It offers truth about what war does—and what we do to survive it.
Fury (2014). Directed by David Ayer. Starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal.
A fictional account of the final months of World War II in Europe, following the crew of an American tank.
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