It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.
For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.
This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.
“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.
Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film.
It follows the Bravo Company in the last 40 days of their rotation in Iraq, and at each mission we observe a riveting test of character. Will James (Jeremy Renner) is a reckless, loose cannon as he works defusing bombs, but Mark Boal’s screenplay skillfully reveals James’s multi-dimensionality without sacrificing suspense.
Taking the place of Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge’s (Brian Geraghty) lost companion in the line of duty, James struts into his job with confidence and swagger that’s disconcerting to his team. In his career he’s defused 837 bombs, so he couldn’t care less about the safety protocol when every one of the bombs he’s defused could get him killed.
For James, each bomb is a clever mind game and a matter of life and death. These set pieces are so engaging on a mental and gut level because of how intricately Bigelow weaves minute details into the scene. We often observe the action at a distance, watching from the perch of an insurgent. If there are eyes watching them work, they could mean anything.
Artistic stylization in some scenes like dust rattling off a car or a bullet casing spinning to the ground offer a heightened precision that reveal all that can happen in an instant, and already we’re dreading an explosion in a way we wouldn’t in other action movies. The amount of time that passes without draining tension is unreal.
“The Hurt Locker’s” cinematographer Barry Ackroyd is a pioneer in the handheld queasy cam technique that has become common in modern warfare films, and yet there is more care and craft here than in some of Ackroyd’s other work, including “Green Zone,” “United 93” and this year’s “Contraband.” Notice how he differentiates between a steady and fidgety hand to both sustain suspense and offer clarity.
This is a very modern war movie because few other war zones depicted on film look historically similar to some of the locations here. As James and Sanborn stalk one facility only to find a boy bomb, the camera is as stealthy as the soldiers are, moving as part of the formation in perfect framing and pacing.
And because it can be so in sync with its subjects, Bigelow is capable of exerting great emotional poignancy in each mission. These absolutely harrowing situations are coupled with a moral uncertainty of how to act, and how hesitating for even a moment can cost a life.
Renner, Mackie and Geraghty all give powerhouse performances of deep complexity and raw masculinity. Their dialogue rings true as something without patriotism or melodrama.
One of the film’s many great moments watches James and Sanborn exchanging punches in the barracks as they test their minds, bodies and character. The way “The Hurt Locker” treats you is much like these soldiers: it pummels you in the gut and knocks you to the floor before invigorating you to jump up and beg for more.
4 stars