As a teen and young adult, I used to regularly read Focus on the Family’s Plugged In magazine. Recently I checked out their review on the film Fury, which I’d recently seen. It can be summarized with these paragraphs:

Some will see that unflinching glimpse at perpetual bloodshed and gray-smoking destruction as something of an antiwar declaration. They’ll see a cautionary tale of men hollowed out and broken by the unspeakable horrors they’ve witnessed.

Others will see this pic as a one-dimensional splatter-fest dressed up in khaki Army fatigues, with limbs innumerable being severed by large-caliber machine gun fire and mortar rounds in a story of brutal, hard-fisted soldiers battling a Nazi evil even more wicked than themselves.

“Did you watch the same movie I did?” I asked.

In case you don’t know, Fury is a WWII film released last fall that stars Brad Pitt and Shia LeBeouf. It’s about a greenhorn Army clerk who ends up on the frontlines with a battle-hardened tank crew and sees firsthand the horrors of war, which makes him more willing to kill the enemy. I read Plugged In’s review because I wanted to see what they thought of Shia LeBeouf’s character, who is a Christian. (LeBeouf reportedly became a Christian during filming). Unsurprisingly, they complained about him, saying, “We see him praying over a wounded soldier and quoting Scripture several times before battle. That said, his faith doesn’t keep Bible from being every bit as foulmouthed, boozy and death-dealing as the rest of his crew.”

“What would you have preferred?” I asked. “That he fit the equally one-dimensional perfect or nigh-perfect stereotypes that populate ‘Christian’ films?” Besides, he swears much less than his compatriots and I only saw him drink alcohol once (and he didn’t get drunk, which is what the Bible condemns, not the consumption of alcohol). When his buddies make crude comments about German women, he rebuffs them. When they harass a German woman, he doesn’t participate. He’s not perfect. No Christian is. But he’s also not the typical religious loon usually seen in Hollywood films.

They also presented Pitt’s character “Wardaddy” as a one-dimensional, jingoistic jarhead you typically see in bad action movies. That more than anything baffled me. I saw a character who in many writers’ hand would’ve been exactly that, but both the script and Pitt’s performance add layers of nuance to him. He’s a man who will shoot an unarmed POW in the back and a few scenes later protect two young German women from his horny subordinates. When he walked into the women’s apartment, I fully expected him to do something terrible to them. But he didn’t. He does encourage the new recruit to sleep with the younger woman (which isn’t shown, so it’s debatable if they did anything). When they walk out he tells the young guy “nothing needs to be said.” But his defining characteristic is his desire to keep his men alive. Yes, he’s a borderline psychopath and possibly mad, but he’ll do whatever it takes to save his men. They respect him for that. He’s a complicated character. I was enthralled by this.

Not only was I bothered by this magazine’s overly biased review, it reminded me of the challenge writers have creating characters. What’s the difference between a well-rounded character and an inconsistent character? The line between them seems fuzzy. A common trait of bad writing is having a character act, well, out of character. For example, it’d be out of character for a patriotic superhero like Captain America to suddenly become a communist. On the other hand, people are full of contradictions. Hardened criminals in prison will abuse child rapists because despite their depravity, they have enough moral fiber to know not to do unspeakable things to children.

This is why my favorite character from Beast Wars (a childhood favorite cartoon) is Dinobot. He’s easily the best-written character in the show because of how complicated he is. He’s too honorable to be a bad guy but too rough to be a good guy. He’ll pull an opponent from cliff edge if said opponent slipped, but he has no qualms with throwing him off the cliff during combat. He defected from the bad guys but considered betraying the good guys later. Yet all of this fit his character.

A more literary (and nebulous) example is Hamlet. Talk about complicated! I haven’t the time or space to adequately examine him. All I will say is he is a man who has a strong sense of justice and strong moral convictions. He believes his uncle is a murderer who should die, but he hesitates to kill him because of that same moral compunction against murder. (I don’t subscribe to the theory that Hamlet was insane). That’s one of many reasons why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is considered to be one of the greatest pieces of literature in the history of the world: the titular character is nuanced, complex, and seemingly contradictory.

Writing characters like this is hard. This is why many writers prefer static, two-dimensional characters. That isn’t to say such characters are inherently bad. There are plenty of great examples out there. But even they must act in ways consistent with their character.

What do you think is/are the difference(s) between well-rounded and inconsistent characters?