I checked two off my list this weekend, and they were both as good as advertised. One now, and one later, after the Super Bowl!
The Hurt Locker is an intense film. Set in Iraq in the middle of the war, it follows a 3-man team of bomb squad technicians. After a mission that results in the death of their leader, the team is taken over by Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner), and his seeming recklessness and disregard for protocol and procedure shocks Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldrige (Brian Geraghty).
Kathryn Bigelow delivers a suspenseful look at this little-seen part of the war in Iraq, where Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are responsible for many more casualties than combat. The opening quote: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug,” is from a book by journalist Chris Hedges called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Mark Boal (In The Valley of Elah) gives us a script, and a lead character, that exemplifies that quote. Renner’s Sgt. James at first comes off as cocky, a swaggering cowboy that only cares about the rush. He both bewilders and awes his teammates, who aren’t sure if they can make it through their final 38 days in rotation with this crazy man at the helm.
Renner is captivating as Will James. Bigelow and Boal never explicitly state why James is so driven to defuse bombs. You understand, though, that it’s just what he is good at, what he thinks he is on the earth to do. He isn’t interested in just making it through his rotation and going safely home to family, he is a man obsessed with understanding explosives and the people who build them. People who are often watching him as he defuses their bombs, a fact the movie makes clear at almost every point. Never has an insurgent populace been shown more vividly in film.
The movie is probably the best one of the 2009 batch. It tells an honest story without taking a political stance. It’s not about whether the war is right or wrong — plenty of other movies have tackled that question — it is about the motivations of the men who fight, about what they do every day in order to get up and face another day in the desert. Bigelow has earned whatever honors the Academy bestows upon her next month.
