The Hurt Locker Review

"War is a drug." - tagline

Indeed it is...

Okay so if you watched the Oscars last night, you know that The Hurt Locker exceeded all expectations and took away the biggest awards that were pretty much expected to go to James Cameron for Avatar. You know how much I love Avatar for being a new, revolutionary experience in terms of it's genre and filmmaking itself. While The Hurt Locker doesn't exactly stand as a pioneer for new filmmaking technology and such, it is definitely a new experience.

I made it a mission to watch it before Oscar season came around because there had been a lot of buzz about it being the number one contender to beat out my beloved Avatar. I managed to watch it on Friday night, two days before Oscar Night. The experience was breathtaking.

It is a new kind of war movie, one of the best certainly. I rank it up there with Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and Jarhead. It most resembles Jarhead in how it chronicles the effects of war in Iraq on soldiers. But where Jarhead described in detail the tedious tasks, inadequacy and overall boredom of the Gulf War soldiers, The Hurt Locker focuses on the intense situations, vicious obstacles, and the total danger the EOD soldiers in Iraq deal with day and day out. These guys' lives are not boring, but they certainly are a lot more difficult to face. The men of Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) units respond to situations in which explosives are the threat. The film opens with an EOD squad losing their squad leader (Guy Pearce) to one of the many destructive bombs they've encountered. His replacement, a specialist, Sgt. Will James (Jeremy Renner, one of this year's Best Actor nominees). From the first moments of his first day on the job, his teammates, consisting of professional Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and timid Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), know he is not going to make their situation any better. He disobeys orders, ignores the team, puts the lives of his team and many others in danger, all to make the job as difficult as possible. We soon learn that disposing bombs for James is not a stress inducing job but an addiction he has grown fond of. A risk addiction. James is a danger junkie. The EOD would, if possible, like to disable all bombs with rover machines that do the job remotely, with them far away. James likes to be up close and personal, like it's a duel. This puts Sanborn and Eldridge on edge throughout, as they try to get through their tour without being killed by bombs, the shifty locals, or their reckless teammate.

The filmmaking aspects of this film are extraordinary. Before watching it I had almost no doubt that James Cameron would win Best Director for all of his craft and imagination, but Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron's ex-wife) brings so much raw power and realism to the story by former jouranlist Mark Boal that the you can almost feel the heat and the flies on your skin too. The film is shot in shaky cam. In fact, it is the shakiest shaky cam I've ever seen in a movie that wasn't shot in a documentary type fashion. This can be disorienting for some audiences, but I think that is the desired effect. Bigelow does everything she possibly can to make this harsh and nerveracking film get under your skin. The action scenes are not fun at all. This is not a complaint but a compliment, because I hate war movies that try to have fun action scenes. You can admire it here because not even a top actor you've just met can be spared. The film has some of the biggest and most destructive explosions I've ever seen, which is good considering the film is about guys who spend their days disabling bombs. I particularly loved the shot of dust rising from the ground in slow motion as the bomb activated. You feel just kind of sickened when you see a man standing next to a bomg, it goes off, he disappears in an envelope of fire and debris, and once the dust settles nothing is left but "a helmet and some hairs" as our characters point out. Also the most intense and probably realistic sniper scene in a movie takes place, featuring our main characters teaming up with a British commando squad led by a badass Ralph Fiennes. Now there's my movie. The acting is key as it is with any movie. Sure we usher in big stars like Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pierce in cameos, but we have the three main performers to give the big performances. A couple of stars I know from TV are here in good roles but small ones, Christian Camargo (A villain on Dexter) plays the good natured but naive military psychiatrist and Evangeline Lilly (Kate from Lost) stars as Renner's distant wife. Anthony Mackie (that guy that Eminem owned at the end of 8 Mile), who has been rising in the acting business profoundly over the past decade, will no doubt receive total star billing after this movie. Brian Gehraghty, who I've seen play guys with little confidence, plays a guy with significantly more confidence but is still unsure of himself and he does it well. But of course the real star here is Jeremy Renner, who steals the show with his gung ho and extremely complex role as Will James. Here is another character like Wikus from District 9 who is completely multi dimensional. Sometimes he is a cool guy, other times a frustrating jerk, and then sometimes you just want to kill him like his teammates. It is not until he has bomb disposal taken away from him that we realize exactly how he thinks. But yeah Renner, totally deserving of the nomination and totally convincing as this crazy guy.

Some war movies, at the center, only hope to serve the purpose of sending an anti war message or serving either the liberal or conservative points of view. The Hurt Locker, however, is only about it's soldiers and what this war, this job, has done to them. Be it the shellshocked mental states of the two saner teammates who act as the audience or the danger junkie who deals with it by playing a personal game between himself and the bomb. It doesn't shy away from showing the Iraqis to be easy to stereotype. When it seems like a local one of the soldiers knew has been killed, his teammates wonder how could he know seeing as how "they all look the same." These soldiers don't have much of a connection to their environment and it's people, but then how could they when anyone of them could be trading information, ready to fire a gun, or dialing a number that activates an explosive. These characters, that the movie is invested in more so than the politics, are complex and human; they don't always do things that make you respect them or even like them, especially James who is just absolutely frustrating. The rest of the army, the whole war in fact seems to be an annoyance to him. The whole film showcases how tired soldiers are of the damn war and the danger, and how some can't think of a world without it. It would seem as if many veterans, no matter what life they live after their time as a soldier, always have the war in their hearts and minds like a hell they willed themselves to call home.

Kathryn Bigelow was before noted for being the best female action director, now she is noted as the first female director to win an Oscar. After watching The Hurt Locker I felt that she would receive the Best Director Award but I was a bit surprised that it won for Best Picture. No doubt it was deserving, but a part of me really thought Avatar would have claimed that. Like James Cameron's, I've liked almost all of the films I've seen of hers (Point Break, Near Dark, Blue Steel, and the very awesome Strange Days). All of these films are about boys and girls who are way in over their heads with guns and violence. The Hurt Locker is her biggest one yet. It is a stunner, a powerful epic story that doesn't want anymore than the audience's attention and contemplation. It may very well have been the best movie of 2009, though not necessarily my favorite. See it and experience it.

This has been yet ANOTHER REVIEW from Your Modest Guru. Thanks for reading.