The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Four Stars
"Open the hurt locker, and learn how rough men come hunting for souls." -- Brian Turner, from his poem "The Hurt Locker"
The Hurt Locker has no axe to grind, pro or con, with the current Iraq war. The film opens with a quote by American war correspondent Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Perhaps a tad obvious, and I'd like to think I would have worked that out for myself from the film that follows the quote, but the quote doesn't only apply to the people on the battlefield. War is a drug for humanity. We wage war over resources, over beliefs, for power. It has been said by many that if we lived in a world without religion, many of the great wars of our past would have been averted. Nonsense. If there was no religion, we would find other reasons to murder, maim, and attempt to control each other.
Kathryn Bigelow's film -- one of the most riveting, spellbinding and best of the year -- doesn't care about the politics behind the Iraq war. It cares about the people on the battlefield, the effect that war has on them, and the massive chasm between the reality of on-site war, and the way the public respond to it. The Hurt Locker dispells some myths that we all perpetuate about this war. I am no authority on war personally, never having enlisted in the Army, Navy, or Marines. My grandfather was with the air force, though, and I think he would agree with what I'm about to say: war is messy -- despite the press conferences for our benefit held by generals about tactics and progress, war is by nature anarchic. War is also surprisingly quiet. Punctuated by disturbances of violent attacks and explosions, yes, but for longer than we might think, it involves waiting. War is also, despite what the recruitment advertisements propagate, not fun.
At no point in The Hurt Locker do the characters appear to have fun. The film opens with a spectacular sequence involving the diffusing of a bomb in Baghdad. An elite Army bomb squad, led by Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), performs a delicate operation in trying to disarm a bomb on a quiet Baghdad corner. One thing I noticed in this scene, and just about all subsequent scenes involving bomb disarmament, is that the local Iraqis simply stand on the street or their balconies and watch the proceedings. They're just as helpless as the Americans, though the Americans have the illusion of possible control of the situation. Sometimes they get lucky. And it does feel like luck, despite the fact that these men know bombs intimately, and behave like neuro-surgeons when faced with dismantling them.
Let's just say that in the opening scene, they don't get lucky. It's not a big spoiler to tell you that we see the bomb go off, and for the rest of the film dread experiencing that feeling of resignation and hopelessness again. The rest of the film follows the team, particularly Sgts. William Jones (Jeremy Renner) and JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Gerarghty) on their bomb squad rotation. They patrol Baghdad, and sometimes are called to diffuse a bomb. Sometimes, trouble just finds them.
While The Hurt Locker is a war picture, it's also an exciting action movie. Bigelow constructs her action sequences with clarity and tension. She shows us what the consequences are if these guys don't do their job right. The action scenes in this film are infinitely more exciting than those in most blockbusters you'll see this year, because we care about the characters involved. While they may merely be cannon fodder from the callous and indifferent war's perspective, to us they are human.
Jeremy Renner brings massive intensity to his role as Sgt. William James, and Oscar glory could well await him come February. There is relatively little dialogue in The Hurt Locker, but no line is wasted. Every conversation, every exchange between the characters says something to us about their state of mind. One scene in which the group come to blows in their dormitory shows us the lengths some will go to in war-time to feel something, even if it that 'something' is anger with the people that are supposed to be on their side.
In so many ways The Hurt Locker represents how the public at large feels about this Iraq war, but it never once calls attention to the political forces that instigated it. Like the soldiers, we're all tired and weary. Most of us feel that the war is directionless and infinite. The Hurt Locker offers a rather uncomfortable suggestion: we might all be right.
Jonathan Fisher
October 26, 2009
Originally Featured at The Film Brief
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