The Hurt Locker movie video clip

The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (to use the increasingly forgotten Rumsfeldian formulation) never really got their John Wayne/Green Berets moment in Hollywood: a big movie whose unembarrassed purpose is to endorse the military action. Most of the serious responses have been liberal-patriot fence-straddlers, multistranded stories urgently set in Washington, the Middle East, south Asia and elsewhere, tying themselves in knots in an attempt to acknowledge a dovey point of view while covertly leaning to the hawk's – pictures such as Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, which showed torture in terms of CIA man George Clooney being tortured by an Arab, Robert Redford's mealy-mouthed Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood's issue-fudging Rendition, and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, with its feeble moral equivalence between jihadist zealots and the US army.

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The Hurt Locker movie overview

The Hurt Locker has been talked up as that rarest of things: a film about the war in Iraq that doesn’t preach or pontificate, that isn’t instant box-office poison. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose track record includes Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), it’s a super-sharp, nerve-shredding thriller that reveals more about the realities of contemporary military conflict than most documentaries, is as fissile and explosive as a Transformers movie, and delivers a powerful and often haunting critique of American society both at home and as its faultlines are expressed abroad.

Written by Mark Boal, who furnished the story for another Iraq-based film, 2007’s In the Valley of Elah, and based on his experiences an embedded Rolling Stone journalist, it is set in 2004 and follows the members of an elite US bomb-disposal team as they move across the debris-littered streets of Baghdad looking for explosive devices to defuse.

After one of them is blown up, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives on the scene. It turns out he’s something of a wild card, a fearless operator who virtually runs to sites of maximum danger, not only disregarding the advice of colleagues, but chucking away the handsets designed to let him hear their concerns about his actions.

It’s understandable if members of his team, among them Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), treat him with the same suspicion they regard every inch of the shredded, debris-littered alleys and public squares they are meant to be looking after. Sanborn, as if to prove that race and class are incendiary issues even for a squad unified by shared objectives, calls him a “red-neck piece of trailer trash” and punches him out. At one point, Sanborn and Eldridge even speculate about killing James, but over time they develop respect if not admiration for his unconventional methods. When they discover that he keeps parts of old bombs under his bed as macabre spoils of war, it’s clear that he’s someone for whom the quotation that prefaces the film — about war being the ultimate drug — is a truism.

Bigelow has always been strong on the psychology and dynamics of male bonding. The scenes in which the men get drunk and start wrestling are captured in all their muscular, playful, erotic intensity. When James feeds juice to Sanborn, wilting after hours in the desert peering through binoculars at a distant combatant, he does so with a delicacy that seems to be borne of more than camaraderie or necessity, from a love that only men who have risked their lives together on a frontline can ever truly appreciate.

The Hurt Locker excels though at making us feel that we are stranded alone with the bomb squad in a landscape full of unknown and potentially infinite dangers. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93) makes telling use of grainy, often handheld photography that recalls the jittery, verite pictures of this conflict that have emerged through channels such as YouTube. It also conveys the nervousness and paranoia the Americans feel when every passing butcher, DVD-vendor or taxi-driver could be an insurgent-in-waiting.

Also of the highest order is Paul N.J. Ottoson’s sound design which renders an unforgettable sonic portrait of Baghdad, a ghosted city full of eerie silences and insidious whispers punctuated by military sirens, the stentorian roar of US soldiers, and the noise of metal ripping through human flesh.

There are small roles for Guy Pearce and, almost comically, for Ralph Fiennes. But the film gains from its lead performers not being A-list stars. Renner is a major find, often recalling the young Russell Crowe in his brawny swagger and isolated intensity.

The Hurt Locker has been criticized in some quarters for not being sufficiently political. One could certainly make a case that it’s not so much about Iraq as it is about war more generally. Perhaps its real subject isn’t even war, but about addiction - to danger, to the company of tough men.

Whatever, the world doesn’t need another film belatedly tut-tutting about Iraq. Bigelow isn’t opposed to commenting on America’s relationship to the Middle East; a secondary plot about James’s fondness for an Iraqi boy called Beckham is handled with black, brilliant irony. But the heart of her story lies in its visceral dramatization of more timeless feelings: fear and loneliness.

The Hurt Locker movie review

The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (to use the increasingly forgotten Rumsfeldian formulation) never really got their John Wayne/Green Berets moment in Hollywood: a big movie whose unembarrassed purpose is to endorse the military action. Most of the serious responses have been liberal-patriot fence-straddlers, multistranded stories urgently set in Washington, the Middle East, south Asia and elsewhere, tying themselves in knots in an attempt to acknowledge a dovey point of view while covertly leaning to the hawk's – pictures such as Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, which showed torture in terms of CIA man George Clooney being tortured by an Arab, Robert Redford's mealy-mouthed Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood's issue-fudging Rendition, and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, with its feeble moral equivalence between jihadist zealots and the US army.

 
How weird and ironic, then, that the nearest thing we have to Wayne is also the best and most insightful anti-war film about Iraq: Kathryn Bigelow's blazingly powerful action movie The Hurt Locker, whose unpretentious clarity makes for a refreshing change. Bigelow is, in dramatic terms, on the side of the soldiers. She has a single location – Baghdad – and wants to find out what is going on inside the US combatants' hearts and minds. Debating the purpose and origins of the conflict is not the point. Yet, for my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing.

The Hurt Locker is about the long, painful endgame in Iraq, the asymmetric nightmare in which the military cannot engage the enemy in any meaningful sense. Their purpose is a long, long series of patrols in which they are heavily armoured moving targets, in continuous danger from what the British call "roadside bombs", a phrase now being superseded by the American term IEDs: Improvised Explosive Devices – bombs hidden in rubble, and detonated as booby-traps or remotely, by phone.

Jeremy Renner stars as Staff Sergeant William James, head of a three-man bomb-tech unit or disposal squad. His immediate subordinate is Sgt Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie, an   African-American nettled by James's redneck recklessness – and the third man is Specialist Eldridge, played by Brian Geraghty, a young soldier   visibly unravelling.

Sgt James is starting to unsettle his team with suicidal displays of bravado. Instead of sending in the remote controlled "auto-bot" with its fixed camera to investigate possible bombs, James is increasingly and impatiently striding in to the Kill Zone himself – as Iraqi civilians look on impassively, some with video cameras, getting ready, as the soldiers say, for their YouTube moment. Sometimes James does not even wear the heavy body armour that would minimise injury if the worst happened. He is earning a reputation as a "wild man" among the top brass, who are not rushing to rebuke him.

Is James becoming unhinged, driven over the edge by the intolerable life-threatening danger that tests the sanity of every soldier? Or is it something politically incorrect to say out loud: that the danger of war is deeply exciting and James wants to mainline it directly into the vein?

Either way, Sanborn and Eldridge, his stunned No 2 and No 3, are in a profound dilemma. They can sympathise with his death wish, certainly – it is an understandable response, perhaps in some Helleresque sense the only sane response, giving the finger to this losing game of Russian roulette. Bigelow adroitly shows how Sanborn and Eldridge resent and yet sympathise with their gung-ho commanding officer.  They are scared by him, and yet they are excited and even inspired by him. In his crazy way, he has leadership qualities. And yet they also know that he could get them all killed. And so Sanborn and Eldridge, with military dispassion, have to weigh up a strategic option: killing James and making it look like an accident or enemy action.

In some ways, Bigelow's film repudiates the conventions of narrative: it could be seen as simply a series of unbearably tense vignettes, in which a soldier, his face dripping with fear and sweat, is hunched surgeon-like over a suspect device in the epicentre of an area that has been cleared in the  shape of the coming blast. In one bizarre but intestine-wrenching scene, James and his men come across some loose-cannon Brits, led by Ralph Fiennes, who affect TE Lawrence-style headgear that almost earns them some fatal friendly fire. The encounter, inevitably, winds up in a wild west shoot-out that has a surreally drawn-out, hallucinatory quality.

That title basically means Shell Shock 2.0. It refers to the physical trauma of being in close proximity, time after time, to the deafening blast of an explosion, controlled or otherwise. That obscene noise and, perhaps just as awful, the tense prelude of compressed silence, encloses you in a tight prison of pain: the "hurt locker". Bigelow's film does a very good job of putting you inside it as well.

The Hurt Locker movie cast and crew

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Jeremy Renner        Anthony Mackie    Brian Geraghty        Guy Pearce    Ralph Fiennes    David Morse    Evangeline Lilly    Christian Camargo        Suhail Aldabbach        Christopher Sayegh        Nabil Koni    Sam Spruell        Sam Redford