Critical Recommendation: The Hurt Locker

Countless movies have been made on the topic of war, and most of them try to pencil-scratch some word on a blank. War is...war is hell, a familiar label popularized by stories like All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet, for as much as humanity seems to subscribe to the sentiment, we still find ourselves constantly going to war. War is...war is exciting. Any action movie will repeat it, and there's something to be said about the undeniable adrenaline rush of combat. War is...war is justified, even fun, a staple of exploitation movies like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Generally, when a writer approaches the war film, they're either attempting to make some meaningful statement about our moral condition as humans or trying to excite something in our sinful, depraved little minds. And so Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker surprised me by doing neither of these things. Its angle is a radical one, a peculiar belief that, more than anything else, war is a drug.

One of the best things about The Hurt Locker is not necessarily its narration of the highs and lows of William James's life in bomb disposal, but rather how this story ponders these ups and downs. Every last disarmament in this movie is a nerve-shredding and uniquely dangerous experience, a terrifyingly drawn-out and methodical horror show that shows us in explosively certain terms that one wrong move can mean instant death. The Hurt Locker effortlessly makes conversation about these ups and downs without relying on much spoken word, saying so much without a single line of dialogue. We're shown not only the inherent dangers of the EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) lifestyle, but also the way the local population looks at the US soldiers and how anxious something seemingly innocuous like not being able to move their Humvee makes the soldiers. The result is an inescapable tension sustained for unbearably long periods, an extreme adherence to the rule that the anticipation of violence is always more effective than the actual thing. The Hurt Locker even features a "days left in Bravo Company's rotation" counter, a small but glaring detail that makes this war feel like something to be escaped, or in the case of James, to possibly be treasured before it's gone.

Despite being a movie specifically about the disarming of IEDs, The Hurt Locker can do a little bit of everything. It's not a sniper movie, yet it contains one of the best sniper sequences I've seen in any film, a minimalistic but oh-so-effectual scene that leans on some remarkable performances from both Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie. It's not really a pro-war or an anti-war movie, as it finds this beautiful and unusually measured contrast between the high of combat and the tragedy it results in. Neither is it a particularly psychological or philosophical film, either. Yet, it still touches remarkably on how war can affect the mind, revealing itself two or three times to be a very different movie than I had expected. And lastly, neither is it necessarily a movie about the slow disintegration of brotherhood, yet it still captures how James's maverick way of doing his job puts him at odds - potentially dangerous odds - with his company. I wondered if his swaggering confidence was more attractive or dangerous, a heavy question when a bomb that can blow away everyone within a hundred-yard radius is a vital consideration.

Every so often, a great movie will come out and change how I think about a genre. I think part of what makes The Hurt Locker so special is its ability to capture so many different angles and perspectives of a war without ever seeming conflicted or watered down in the slightest. The fear, joy, sadness, excitement, and even occasional routine of this film all feel like one cohesive force, a runaway freight train of outstanding filmmaking prowess. It's one of the best war movies I've ever seen, not because it does anything particularly new for the genre, but rather because it does everything everyone else does in a way no one else can.

The Hurt Locker - 10/10

1 Corinthians 6:12