Cover Illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1952
I'll admit that I haven't read much about director Kathryn Bigelow, but, looking at her filmography, it looks like she's trying to win a game of genre bingo with as few plays as possible. She has never made the same kind of film twice in her career, and her films have very little in common - Near Dark was vampire horror, Blue Steel was a noir thriller, Point Break was big dumb action, Strange Days was cyberpunk, The Weight of Water was dramatic mystery, and K-19 was historical fiction. And now she has made her war movie, so she can check that off the list. Oddly, though, The Hurt Locker transcends the faceless genre exercises of her earlier work and delivers something really substantial.
The Hurt Locker is about the soldiers in a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq - the guys that disarm improvised bombs, car bombs, and (apparently) suicide bombs. Probably because it's based on the experiences of writer Mark Boal embedded with a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, there is a very dry, procedural approach to the movie's material that appeals to me. Much like HBO's excellent mini-series Generation Kill, the story is not about super-soldiers or high drama - The Hurt Locker is about normal young people who are able to rise above the confusing, depressing, and dangerous environment of fighting a foreign war. The movie focuses on two soldiers, Will James (Dahmer's Jeremy Renner) and JT Sanborn (We Are Marshall's Anthony Mackie) - the former is the maverick and the latter is the by-the-book guy. But The Hurt Locker doesn't play like a "buddy" movie - the unglamorous, documentary-like approach of the film defuses such typically Hollywood associations.
The leads' performances are excellent, and the film's pacing is surprisingly good, considering that it eschews the standard plot arc (for the most part - more on that in a minute). The look and feel of the movie are note-perfect and really draw the audience in - I think that the choice to film in Jordan with Iraqi refugees playing the locals has a lot to do with this. As a guy who grew up hanging around an army base, I tend to measure military movies in terms of how I think a young GI would see them. GIs, in my experience, typically love either high action or serious realism, either providing pure entertainment or an actual insight into the "soldier" experience. I think that The Hurt Locker hits the latter mark pretty well, although I have misgivings about a few things.
First, the bomb disposal units of the U.S. Army use robots - everyone knows this. However, in The Hurt Locker, the robot disappears after the opening sequence, and this doesn't really ring true. I also had issues with some jarring celebrity cameos - if you cast relative unknowns as the movie's leads, what is the point of throwing Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, and LOST's Evangeline Lilly into random scenes? And, although I really liked the another-day-another-bomb plot structure, it felt a little like each scenario tried to one-up the previous one, escalating the drama artificially. This ratcheting-up was not needed and only made the slight misstep in the movie's final chapter seem like more of a let-down.
Overall, though, I enjoyed The Hurt Locker as much as anything else I've seen this year. If you only see one bomb-disarmament thriller this year, make it this one!
"Homemade Bombs in the Afternoon" by A.C. Newman
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