The Hurt Locker (2009)

Iraq war realistically portrayed on film

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

 

A winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It beat out the film directed by Bigelow’s former husband. James Cameron (Avatar). Screenplay was written by Bigelow and Mark Boal, who had spent months attached to a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. This is what gives the film its look and feel.

 

It focuses on three men: Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner), Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Eldridge (James Geraghty)  who are part of a bomb disposal unit during the Iraq war.  They are in their last 30 days of rotation.  It is shot with fast edits, looking much like a newscast. It is a picture of war close to the present day. There is little elegance in the look of the film. It is dirty, gritty, and dusty, like its environment. There are few long shots. Once in awhile, everything stops. At one point, the camera stares at a shell casing bouncing and cartwheeling on the ground in slow motion.

 

The message is also that after war, a return to a peaceful life at home is completely mundane and very far from the constant tension of a war zone. We watch James walking through the quiet and empty aisles of a supermarket as pleasing canned instrumental music plays. Then we see him at home with his wife and child, seemingly disinterested in the calm existence so different from the tense atmosphere of Iraq. The film closes with him returning to Iraq on the first day of another year’s rotation.

 

The film is striking and gives you a clear idea of contemporary warfare. There are a few noted actors in the film, but they are disposed of rather quickly. Guy Pearce (Sgt. Thompson)  (L.A. Confidential) dies within the first ten minutes. David Morse (Col. Reed) (The Green Mile), and Ralph Fiennes (leader of a Private Military Company unit) (Schindler’s List, The English Patient) are also featured briefly.

 

It is quite deserving of its recognition.  It has a certain kinship to an earlier Bigelow movie, Strange Days, by its similar newsreel look.