Since, The Hurt Locker is this year’s underdog for the Best Picture at the Oscars, Maria and I thought we’d give it a try this past weekend.
First impressions, going into this film, was that it was going to be a war movie set in modern-day Iraq. I pictured a kind of tactical-based combat movie, with a mix of interesting characters and meaningful drama say, like, Saving Private Ryan. Now Saving Private Ryan is good in its own right, but it’s been done. So I didn’t have incredibly high hopes for this film. But instead, The Hurt Locker was quite different from my expectations and quite good.
The movie follows a three-man bomb-defusal unit as they work, and live, over the course of about a month in Iraq. For the most part, in almost a docu-drama style, we move from bomb scene to bomb scene with a few different bits thrown in there to punctuate things (like a sniper). Sometimes the camera is hand-held, at which times it feels very much like a documentary. Other times, the cameras are stationary and, it’s acted and it feels more like a fictional film. It’s interesting, it’s unnerving, but it’s ultimately pretty repetitive. But as the movie progresses, and the characters begin to develop, you begin to see that that’s the point. I think.
The work of the bomb squad in The Hurt Locker is repetitive, and stressful, and dangerous and that’s life in Iraq. This movie is about life in Iraq and, taken for what it is, it’s really good.
The characters are complex, like real people; they’re emotionally unstable, like real people, and they go through the film like real people. They’re not presented or proposed to be superheroes. They’re imperfect beings, fighting this awful war for reasons that, like themselves, are incredibly complex.
The Hurt Locker isn’t just another movie about war. It isn’t even just another movie about the war in Iraq. When I sat down to write this review I thought about writing, “Do we really need another movie about war?” But there’s more to this film than just that. It highlights life in Iraq, no bells and whistles. And no bells and whistles is important. It highlights the nature of war: the complicated relationships between soldiers, between civilians and the military, between warring sides—between human beings. And it’s pretty ingenious in its commentary.
Instead of taking a heavy-handed critical approach to war, instead of laying out the groundwork for us (as it does) and then saying, See… see… war sucks, The Hurt Locker is subtle in its approach. So subtle, I think, that I almost wonder if it’s really intentional. But it must be. The writer of The Hurt Locker says, “War sucks, but it’s complicated,” and leaves it there. I appreciate that.
[...] Oscar picks for Best Picture and might have a chance to watch them soon. We’ve seen The Hurt Locker, and the next two lined up are Precious and District 9. I’ve heard relatively nothing about [...]