Brad Pitt in Fury (Giles Keyte/Columbia Pictures)

Director David Ayer is far from the only Hollywood director with a keen interest in depicting graphic violence, but he is one of the few with an equally earnest commitment to showing the consequences of violence in all of its unglamorous detail.

In his previous directorial efforts, like 2012’s wrenching End of Watch and 2005’s underrated Christian Bale-with-PTSD movie Harsh Times as well as his screenplay for Training Day, Ayer focused on the brutal realities of Los Angeles street gang violence. (We can skip over his recent Sabotage, which was intended to be a fun, dopey welcome back to Hollywood party for Arnold Schwarzenegger). His best films are filled with gritty, hyper realistic, assaultive cinematography, putting you right in the thick of the chaos. With Fury, that same rough, in-your-face style is brought to the grand setting of the final days of World War II, as Allied forces make incursions into the Nazi homeland in an effort to force the proud Germans to submit.

Brad Pitt has played this role before, as the collector of Nazi scalps Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds, but Raine was played for absurd laughs and with a slightly funky accent. Here, as Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier, Pitt is much more intense and serious, though no less fond of carving up Nazis. Aldo Raine was not an Oscar worthy part, but Sergeant Collier just might be.

Audiences haven’t quite seen World War II depicted in this relentlessly gruesome a way before, except for maybe the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Fury essentially stretches out the punishing, sickening mayhem of that film’s opening throughout its entire running time, with one notable exception. In a long scene after Collier’s tank crew takes a strategically important German city, Collier and newbie Norman (Logan Lerman) try to eke out some temporary domestic peace in the apartment of two female German cousins. The women are terrified, and the Americans’ attempts to enjoy a pleasant meal with them is shot through with the tense foreboding of the Hans Landa strudel scene from Basterds, especially when the more depraved members of Collier’s tank crew crash the tea party.

The team operates Collier’s tank, which is called Fury. Years of living inside that cramped death machine has made them good at killing and surviving, but not good men. This is especially true for artillery shell loader Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal), who clearly was too much of a brute to function well in civilian life before the war, but has thrived in the simplified savagery of wartime. Bernthal looks like a soldier, and should probably be in every war movie from here on out.

The tank’s driver, Trini “Gordo” Garcia (frequent Ayer collaborator Michael Peña) is less thuggish, though he lectures Norman matter-of-factly on the finer points of harvesting Nazi meat in the most efficient way. Shia LaBeouf plays artillery gunner Boyd “Bible” Swan, a reserved, serious man who has kept his sanity only through fanatical reliance on the Christian God. In a war as vicious as World War II, there isn’t really room for good men, only ones who are somewhat less evil than others, and a central theme of Fury is watching young Norman embrace his inner sadist for the greater good of wiping the Nazi menace from the face of the earth.

Norman’s first task is to wipe up the blood and guts of the man he is replacing. His role is perhaps the most callous, as he scans areas for individual enemies to fill with lead with a gun, rather than launching massive artillery shells at enemy fortifications or vehicles. As such, he needs to be a remorseless killer, and Sergeant Collier immediately senses that he doesn’t have a deadly bone in his body. In a memorable scene, Collier forces Norman to undergo a psychologically scarring crash course in Nazi murder, which Norman resists as best he can.

Another standout moment depicts the nearly invincible German panzer taking on a fleet of Allied tanks, as it chews up tank after tank, impervious to all arms fired at it head-on. The Fury crew, in their desperation, have to get creative to survive, and it’s a real treat to watch the crew work together as a unit to defeat the beast.

One of the best reasons to go to a movie is to temporarily enter another world. After watching Fury, you’ll feel like you survived (just barely) a ferocious battle before gratefully returning to your comparatively pleasant life. But you won’t easily forget the mud, the blood, the deafening explosions, and the hellishness of tank warfare. As Bible Swan tells Norman upon first meeting him, “Just wait until you see what a man can do to another man.”