First and foremost, Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a movie about junkiedom. It pretty much announces itself as such with its opening title, a quote from War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning author Chris Hedges, bluntly stating “war is a drug.”
But like the very best addiction tales—and there aren’t all that many, in either film or literature—The Hurt Locker conveys an understanding that a monkey on one’s back is a more complicated thing than those blessed enough to not be gifted with one can easily apprehend. The bomb-defusing Sergeant William James (played with a remarkably eloquent physicality by Jeremy Renner), with nearly 900 victories over explosives to his credit, is neither the “wild man” an admiring Colonel calls him, nor the “adrenaline-fix” seeker one of his more conventional colleagues accuses him of being. No. Journalist Mark Boal’s script and Bigelow’s adroit, frequently inspired direction give the viewer, without undue speechifying or visual telegraphing, a satisfyingly full picture of what makes this one-man band tick. During one particularly tense duel with an extra-ingeniously-rigged car bomb, James throws off his kevlar suit (“He’s reckless,” scoffs the aforementioned conventional colleague, played by Anthony Mackie in a performance that’s just as beautifully modulated as Renner’s), saying, “If I’m gonna die, I wanna be comfortable.” Later in the picture, James’ colleagues discover a box he keeps under his bed, filled with various detonators and sundry other devices that he’s collected in the wake of keeping them from delivering an explosive charge. “These things almost killed me,” he explains to his befuddled confreres.
It isn’t about wildness, or adrenaline; James is conducting an absolutely personal war, locked in existential battle against forces—mechanical, electronic, incendiary—that mean to do him harm. What sparse plot the film has deals with the people and events that could remove him from this never-ending war, to compel him to look at, and care about, a larger picture. The Hurt Locker is set in Iraq in 2004, and many of the critics who love it have said it’s the least ideological of Iraq-based films; John Nolte’s dissenting voice on the picture over at Big Hollywood suggests that the only fictional Iraq War picture that will satisfy conservatives is some hybrid of The Sands of Iwo Jima and The Green Berets, and he’s right to say that Bigelow’s picture certainly ain’t that. But the more mainstream critics are correct inasmuch as The Hurt Locker isn’t about the Iraq War per se, but rather about war as a condition. Which they don’t really deserve a whole lot of credit for understanding, since, as noted above, that’s what the film announces itself as being about from the very beginning.
Visually and viscerally it is a very remarkable piece of work. With its very first explosion, Bigelow upends all the cliches of slow-motion photography; instead of honing in on the flames and shrapnel, she examines the sand and the pebbles as they move from the ground in straight lines up into the air, and on the layers of dust leaping from a parked car. The emphasis is on how this calamity changes everything about the setting. There are sequences that combine the excruciating tension of Mann’s Men In War with the visionary desertscapes of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Bigelow captures the awful stillness of the dry, hot environment with merciless clarity, as she hones in on a gunman waiting, waiting, waiting for the right frame and the right moment to take a shot at the enemy, lying with pained patience as a fly contentedly lands on his eyelid.
Still, contrary to some of the more fulsome claims made by enthusiastic critics (which have already begun to give off the sweet stink of special pleading in the “Hey, look, we really do like action movies as much as the next guy!” mode, which is unfortunate) The Hurt Locker does not remap the war movie from top to bottom. Some business involving a potential Section Eight soldier is a bit pat; so, too, is the fate of a rather dinky peripheral character who might as well be named “Dead Meat” in the manner of the Anthony Edwards Top Gun role so accurately lampooned in Hot Shots!. Bigelow handles this guy’s demise in a way that says “Character Is Destiny” and “Destiny Is A Cruel Joke” at the same time, and the paradox makes the grim payoff more palatable than it might have been otherwise. Still, the bit has the air of the commonplace about it.
That’s a quibble, though. Nothing, finally, detracts from the movie’s aggregate of observational coups, which extend into a stateside sojourn that sees a key character lost in a supermarket, his life’s meaning reduced to the point that his heaviest responsibility is making a choice of cereal. Watching, I heard the Gang of Four’s song “Paralyzed” in the back of my mind: “I cant work out what has gone wrong/I was good at what I did.” The punchline that follows is mordant and entirely apt. Damn good movie.
Bigelow’s been locked in movie jail for far too long, and for what? “K‑19”? “The Weight of Water”? Neither are as good as this film is, but they’re hardly the snoozefests they were thought to be at the time. “K‑19” is an especially lo-fi, similarly procedural spin on the submarine thriller, almost “The International” to “The Hunt for Red October“s Bourne trilogy (does that even make any sense?). For that matter, silly subject matter aside, “Point Break” still holds up as a remarkably intense and exciting action movie.
The punchline being that this is one of the few war movies to suggest that the home life of a soldier is often so monotonous, dull and contemptible that it may well be preferable to be part of an Army bomb disposal unit facing death on a daily basis. A good point well made.
@matty: I’ve been meaning to for a while, but seeing “Locker” has moved a viewing of the Blu-ray of “Point Break” up on my schedule. I do hope that whatever success “Locker” enjoys will maybe spur a critical reassessment of Bigelow. To which maybe I’ll contribute. I’m particularly eager to give the much-maligned “Strange Days” another look.
I had issues with the lack of a cohesive plot while watching this movie, but got over it by the time it was over. I agree that this is a damn good movie, mostly to Jeremy Renner’s credit. I forget who made the point (I think it was in Film Comment), but he really does have an uncanny ability to act out the entire meaning of a scene with just facial expression(s). I hope to see more of him in the future now that ABC-TV terminated “The Unusuals”.
And I’ve always thought Strange Days was extremely underrated, aside from the poor choice to set it in a 1999 not distant enough future.
I love Strange Days, myself, but I think I saw it at just the right age to love it.
I felt “Hurt Locker” was the right script for Bigelow to show her talents as a director. Since seeing it yesterday, I find myself replaying sequences in my head, particularly how she built up tension in each bomb defusing through editing and shot selection.
I’ve always been a fan of “Point Break”. While admittedly goofy, it has a true go-for-broke quality to its nuttiness that makes action movies today feel neutered. And I never understood why “Strange Days” is so maligned. It’s certainly not perfect (the ending is a bit much), but there are some genuine ideas in the movie, plus two strong performances from Fiennes and Bassett.
Point Break and Strange Days are wonderful films, and look like masterpieces compared to the shit we’re given today.
The Hurt Locker is a real return-to-form for Bigelow, the audience I saw it with sat enthralled for two hours and then burst into applause as the credits rolled. Great final scene, with a thrilling match-cut.
Agree with Markj and everyone else on Point Break and Strange Days. Both good films – and you don’t even have to compare them to today’s actioners. I don’t consider myself very prescient and I liked both a lot even at the time they were released.
@campaspe: Agreed, Point Break and Strange Days have both been wonderful from the word go. I read a piece recently analysing the names of the characters in Strange Days and their relevance to the theme of sight and seeing in the film. I hadn’t even considered that the name of the character murdered in the POV rape scene is Iris.
@Dan Coyle
Yeah, you have a point. It’s very much a teenage-boy kinda movie. Smarter than it looks, but not as smart as some might lead you to believe (admittedly, I do love that “Hey, is this a shatter-proof crystal?” line).
Hopefully Bigelow will be allowed in from the cold. I’m a bit pissed this film isn’t showing in Boston at the moment. We’ve got four indie theaters…wtf?
Not to beat a dead horse, but I rewatched “Strange Days”, which I found dated, inelegant, but still fierce and bold and kind of brilliant. And that’s setting aside the obvious technical skill that it must have taken.
I wonder if Brigette Bako still gets recognized for Strange Days, and how that makes her feel. That’s probably her best known role.
Oh, John Nolte, you freakin’ child. I read his full review and he complains, oh he COMPLAINS about how the Iraqis are portrayed. Like you give a flying fuck about Iraqis, Johnny Boy. Like I don’t somehow because I disagree with you.
Point Break is a case of an extraordinarily stupid script being handed to a skilled director, and that director making something defiantly watchable out of it. One can’t really defend the faux-serious surfer-philosophy pretensions, nor the forehead-slap-inducing performances of Keanu and Swayze. It’s not even close to a great movie – “Near Dark” is the great one, people. If you want to spend some time with Bigelow’s filmography, start there. A beautiful film.
This is certainly a good movie, but I’d have a real hard time identifying the director without any advanced knowledge. Maybe Bigelow felt the need to show some reverence toward the script’s journalistic origins by playing down her more extravagant aesthetic impulses. Nonetheless, I missed the woman who made Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days, and (though I haven’t seen it since childhood and probably have overrated it) the weirdest episodes of the Wild Palms miniseries. Good movie, but certain parts cried out for a surreal touch–i.e. the “boy bomb” and its aftermath. Still good; just not the Bigelow comeback I was hoping for.
I dunno, S.F., POINT BREAK gets extra points for making me tolerate Keanu as an FBI agent. But seriously, it is a pretty solid action movie that is underrated because of its genre more than anything else. Yes, NEAR DARK is great also, but it’s more of a tiny gem compared to the grand POINT BREAK.
@Joel,
The film seemed to fit in comfortably with the rest of her oeuvre, particularly in the way it explores a protagonist who is “living in the moment” like POINT BREAK’s Bodhi, and in a more extreme and unhealthy way, Eugene in BLUE STEEL. I explain it in more detail in my own review of the film.
I was talking to a actual EOD technician that has been to Iraq numerous times and asked him what he thought of the movie. He said he watched about 1 hour of it and had to leave because of how absolutely unrealistic it is. He told me that if that had been his guy, he would have shot him because of how absolutely unsafe he is. Add to that, the majority of the EOD disarmments are done via robot.