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The Hurt Locker
Framing the war in Iraq as a nerve-shredding psychological arena rather than a political quagmire, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker plugs the viewer into the lives of three Army bomb- squad technicians living out their final month of duty in Baghdad during the summer of 2004. This visceral and tightly focused approach naturally limits the film’s scope but does not denigrate Bigelow’s accomplishment in the least. In her unflinching and detailed recreation of how bomb- squad technicians attempt to control an urban battleground defined by deadly eruptions of violence, she offers the audience an empathetic window into a modern-day soldier’s frantic, moment-by-moment experience.
Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (who based his script on his experiences while embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad in Baghdad) construct the film around seven major sequences in which the protagonists must either defuse a potential explosive device or battle Iraqi insurgents. The prospect of a sudden slide into explosive bedlam saturates every minute of these scenes, and Bigelow’s frenetic yet remarkably controlled sense of pacing confidently guides us through each tense second. Her camera is everywhere—scanning the bomb site from a nearby roof one second, rapidly zooming in on a soldier’s tense face the next—allowing us to fully comprehend the mounting stakes even as we connect to the soldier’s fears. The film’s first major explosion has an almost surrealistic feel, with layers of dirt rising from the ground in hypnotic slow motion. Lest we become too comfortable with the film’s expertly modulated sense of suspense, however, Bigelow will jolt us with an unexpected bullet to a character’s brain or a gut-churning explosion in the corner of the frame that reminds us of the inherently anarchic nature of her setting.
The Hurt Locker is a film about men shaped by action, and Boal is shrewd in his definition of characters through their courage—and folly—under fire. This proves especially true of Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a highly skilled loose cannon of a bomb specialist who enters the film to replace the squad’s fallen leader. We initially see William through the skeptical eyes of sober, by-the-book Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (an excellent Anthony Mackie). William’s reckless sense of self-righteousness seems to signal a showdown between him and J.T., with discontented Sergeant Own Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) falling somewhere between the one’s devil-may-care volatility and the other’s restrained sense of duty. Gradually, though, William’s natural empathy begins to emerge on the battlefield, and The Hurt Locker slowly becomes his film, as he struggles to reconcile his addictive love of combat with the emotional exhaustion that accompany the war’s horrors.
Renner’s virtuoso performance brings authenticity to the role of William as he vainly attempts to avenge the senseless death of an unexpected acquaintance and struggles with the thought of resuming his domestic life back in the United States. And Bigelow’s vision of combat—its wrenching and random cruelty—is surpassing, reaching out to a war-benumbed audience and jolting us to empathetic attention.
Matt Connolly
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