The Hurt Locker
Both a war movie and a character study, where the action scenes provide genuine tension and excitement, because we care about the characters involved and what happens to them.

Coming after the summer blockbuster season, where all too often flimsy characters are an excuse for two hours of mindless action, this film comes as a welcome breath of fresh air – The Hurt Locker is both a war movie and a character study, where the action scenes provide genuine tension and excitement, because we care about the characters involved and what happens to them. The film primarily looks at the motivations and drives of three soldiers in the Bravo Company as they come to the end of their rotation in Iraq war. Bravo Company is a bomb disposal squad. Based in and around Baghdad, they are the ones tasked with defusing or destroying the improvised explosive devices that are the weapon of choice for the Iraqi insurgents. This is an exceptionally dangerous job, more often than not, one with no enemy in sight. The best the bomb disposal can do is to safely remove the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs for short, while the men behind them can simply put another IED somewhere else the next day. However skilled the bomb disposal experts are, they can’t be lucky all the time, and the sense of inevitability of tragedy for some of these soldiers pervades the whole film.

Screenwriter Mark Boal (The Valley of Elah) spent weeks embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad as they spent their days disarming IEDs. The research comes though on screen, and the settings, reactions of the characters, and the situations they find themselves in all ring true. The director Kathyrn Bigelow (Point Break, Near Dark) shoots the action in a documentary style, largely with handheld cameras. Combined with the Jordanian settings and many actors with genuine experience of the war, it feels alarmingly real.

The Hurt Locker focuses particularly on the new leader of the team Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), and the ongoing dilemma of his team mates over his risk-taking nature, which they feel endangers them unnecessarily. The film looks at whether he is becoming addicted to the adrenaline rush of taking risks, or whether he wants to do whatever he can to save lives. The two other members are the bomb squad are also fully rounded characters – the cynical and weary Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and the worried and pessimistic Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). All the other characters in the movie provide brief supporting turns, including memorable cameos from Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes, temporarily coming into contact with the lives of the three main characters as they move through the theatre of war, and providing counterpoints to the actions they take.

The film isn’t lacking in intense sequences either, and these come in two types: tension-filled scenes of bomb defusing where one false move or too many delays could mean disaster, and pitched gun battles which explode off the screen. In both cases, death, when it comes, is sudden and shocking. The music that underscores these scenes is another aspect of the film worthy of praise; subdued for most of the running time, during the intense sequences it pounds away like the throbbing of a beating heart, adding immediacy and excitement to these scenes. As the film goes on, the stakes become higher, and the action scenes more brutal, there is a real sense of danger and the sense that anyone could die at any moment.

The film never takes an ideological stance, and unlike many other recent Iraq war films, where the purpose of making the film seems mainly to provide platforms for the filmmakers to attack the war, none of the characters are used as mouthpieces, and the war is viewed as a situation that these characters have been thrust into. Neither the brutality nor the triumphs are mitigated, and what forms the heart of the film is how the characters deal with the situation. The Hurt Locker is probably the best film about the Iraq war so far, and worthy of comparison with some of the classic films about the Vietnam War.

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