The Hurt Locker (Saturday, June 27, 2009) (74)

I'm generally not a big fan of contemporary war movies. I think many of them present war as either a masculinizing force or a heroic thing or a specifically dishonorable and emasculating thing. The fact that this movie opens with a Chris Hedges quote about how war is a powerful intoxicant when it gets in you... well, it was very encouraging (I think Hedges is pretty great).

The film is rather episodic and without plot per se. We meet an elite bomb removal/defusal unit in Iraq who are a team of three soldiers who are very close after about a year of working together in the shit. When the leader is killed in action by a bomb, a new hands-on specialist comes in to take his place. He has a brash style that doesn't sit well with his two squad-mates. We follow them for about a month - their last month in their tour before they return home.

What we see over the days is how all these men are very well suited for their jobs, but not totally able to deal with the rest of their lives - the emotional and mundane stuff. At one point, after an especially stressful and successful outing, they find themselves drinking and wresting and punching each other Fight-Club-style. Clearly physicality and violence is the main way they relate to the world.

The directing by Kathryn Bigelow is really fantastic. She lets the actors (especially Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie) really exist in their roles with lots of space to move around (from crazy and brash to sad and emotionally on edge) and allows the scenes to play out without rushing them or being preachy or sentimental. Most of the film is shot with hand-held cameras - which made me rather sick, but was totally effective in putting us in the middle of the action.

We ultimately find that these men are trained warriors who see such sick and bizarre shit in their work that they lose track of the normal world and their places in it. The deaths they see are so random - almost cruelly ironic - that they have trouble understanding if they're living real lives or taking part in a written story (of course, as characters, they are in a real world of their own and not 'written' - but from their point of view, it seems to them like their lives are fated for one thing or another).

I really liked the costumes - which were mostly Army fatigues - but they added a lot of personality to the show (I guess I can thank the Pentagon and my tax dollars for this). The bomb detonating suit itself is amazing (having never seen one before) and other-worldly. It looks like a space suit and a mid-century, pre-SCUBA diving suit. I especially love how Bigelow lets the actors wearing it joke about its cumbersomeness.

I love that this is not sentimental and very matter-of-fact. The men are either animals or tech geniuses with balls of steel, depending on how you look at them. We don't get the 'war is hell, war is stupid' refrain common in many war films. These men have a job to do and they do it - and do it well. The few scenes of life back in the 'real world' (in the U.S.) make that life so mundane and ridiculous, that we understand the appeal of the action in Iraq.

This is one of the best films of the year. It is massively powerful and really beautiful in its own way.

Stars: 4 of 4