Review: The Hurt Locker

Posted by Cynical Sarah on March 26, 2010

I’m finally starting to get around to watching some of the movies that were center stage at the Oscars. Might as well start with the big winner for the evening, best picture The Hurt Locker.

My initial feeling after the movie was over was that it was intense. Most movies will give you a break from the stress with a little humor break or just a break in the action. The Hurt Locker puts you on edge from the very first scene and the only break you get is at the end.

There were moments when I had to consciously make myself relax, stop squeezing so tight to my husband’s arm or take a deep breath to get my shoulders to relax.

In other words, this movie will suck you right into the story from the very start, and it’s hard to separate yourself from the intensity on the screen.  Some of that has to do with the almost documentary feel of the film. It looked and felt so real, like I really was watching a slice of military life in Iraq.

I’m so used to seeing movies where millions of dollars are spent on special effects to make scenes bigger than reality. This could easily have been one of those movies – there’s plenty of opportunity for giant explosions and crazy slo-mo gunfights. Instead, Kathryn Bigelow avoids playing things up with special effect which could have made this a typical hero war movie.

Sticking closer to what would be realistic focuses more on the actual characters and the idea that real people go through this in Iraq. It also increases the “What the hell is wrong with that guy?” factor as you watch Staff Sgt. William James going about his duties of disarming IEDs. If this is what it’s really like in Iraq, why would anyone voluntarily do this job?

But James isn’t made to look like a hero either. What he does is heroic, but nothing in the way this is filmed portrays him as a hero. That’s where slo-mo fight sequences and giant explosions would have changed the feel of this movie completely.

That is what makes this movie so good; it doesn’t romanticize the war or the people who do this job in real life.

It was for that reason that I initially didn’t like how The Hurt Locker ends as well. After keeping it real through the squads final month in Iraq, the final scene is Staff Sgt. James returning for another tour in Iraq. As he steps back out into the dessert, the typical hero type music starts to play and as the shot shifts from him in uniform to him in the bomb suit, we’re also given the typical hero shot with the camera angle looking up at him from down low.

Initially I was pissed off that the ending strayed so far from the feel of the rest of the movie, but after time to really mentally chew on it, a light bulb went off.

The Hurt Locker is a character study as much as it is a movie about a slice of what the war is like. Why does James do this job, and why does he do it in such a risky way? The answer is in the ending. When he goes home, we see the extreme difference between his domestic life and his life in Iraq. There’s no excitement there for him, no adrenaline rush.

That’s not the full answer though. The final scene with his return to Iraq for another tour finishes that answer. I think the departure from realistic to typical movie-hero shots isn’t meant to make us think of James as a hero, but to give us a glimpse of how he sees himself out there.

The way Bigelow puts together the film from Mark Boal’s script, The Hurt Locker is a brilliantly done, intelligent look at the war. I highly recommend this one.

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