Friday, July 02, 2021

The Hurt Locker (2008)

USA, 131 minutes
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: Mark Boal
Photography: Barry Ackroyd
Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders
Editors: Chris Innis, Bob Murawski
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, Evangeline Lilly

Technology has improved for making war films as well as for making war and The Hurt Locker is a picture that benefits from it. Though it has a lot of the usual predictable cliches, such as counting down days in-country before rotating out, the grinding physical tension as a mission plays out, and of course the ordnance going off as spectacularly as possible, this story of US soldiers waging war in Iraq circa 2004 is still remarkably good, easy to fall into at any point you join and thus ideal for catching repeatedly on cable-TV, at least as much as they show it. As it happens, The Hurt Locker was no box office smash—it won a Best Picture Oscar (and five others, including Best Director), but is the lowest-grossing winner ever.

It's all movement, flash, action but almost always lucid, focusing on the aspects of Iraq that make it unique: the desert setting, the dangerously ambiguous front lines of battle, and the extensive use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs—bombs) and the technicians used to disarm them. That's where Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) comes in. He has a knack not to say a gift for standing down these bombs. The Hurt Locker traffics in another cliché with him, this one perhaps borrowed from Vietnam movies: he's an adrenaline junkie. He's good at his job (disarming IEDs) but he's a cowboy often taking unnecessary chances, and he's not above endangering others or taking off on his own self-directed missions. He's a restless soul. War is the only place he can find peace.


We've seen it before—war remains among the most conservative genres for movies, working with the same elements even when they may officially be antiwar. The Hurt Locker is not clear on that point, more like a rorschach test. It looks antiwar to me—the brutality, the death, the senselessness of it all—but I can also imagine people running off inspired to enlist after seeing it. That goes to the credit, I guess, of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, who seem more intent on showing war as it is rather than making a moral case either way. The stance works well here but would get to be more of a problem in their follow-up picture in 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, which unfortunately took more of a stake in arguments for the efficacy of torture.

The Hurt Locker works best as something simply to gape at. It moves swiftly and it's rarely less than enthralling. Bigelow and crew got their hands on some high-end equipment and film stock used more often for sports. The images are impossibly detailed even when they are fast, and they are often fast. Things blow up. People are randomly killed. It's not always clear who is responsible though there may be many suspicious figures. The scenes come together quickly. IEDs or in one case an Iraqi man with bombs shackled onto him are found and our squad of James, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are dispatched to deal with it. James carries on often outside the book, alarming his teammates and lots of witnesses, but he generally gets the job done, or at least accomplishes something without getting himself hurt.

Speaking of which, the title—I don't think I heard it once in the movie—refers to an expression common among US solders fighting in Iraq. "To put someone in a 'hurt locker,'" IMDb helpfully explains, "is roughly synonymous with causing someone 'a world of pain.'" It's arguable that the whole Iraq war effort of the 2000s (if not the 1990s and Afghanistan too) was one big hurt locker. Practically every situation we see, most presented as typical of the war, is ambiguous and fraught with peril—this tension is the great strength of many of the movie's best scenes. We don't know when or how the ordnance will go off and we don't know which Iraqis will be helpful to them or undermine them. We only know, as they do, that things will happen fast and lethally when they happen.

In one of the best scenes our guys and some others are pinned down in the remorseless desert sun by snipers in a building hundreds of meters away, having lost one of their own. Sanford, the squad's sniper, has to take the insurgents down. We're shown the agonizingly long and motionless time that precedes single sniper shots. We see Sanford's shots go wide or fall short but come tantalizingly close. Then he runs out of ammo and the magazine passed up to him to replace it is jammed by blood. They have to painstakingly clear the blood in the heat of battle and the literally overwhelming heat of the desert. Amazing moment.

There's a lot of that here. Bigelow is not innovating much of anything with The Hurt Locker but instead working out the rules of the war film, fitting them to Iraq. It's focused more purely on the sensations of modern combat, which are terrifying. As such, The Hurt Locker is eerily effective. Bigelow has stripped away many inessentials of war pictures and what remains is impressive and even inspiring in its gemlike focus.

1 comment:

  1. Bigelow was a favorite of mine ever since Near Dark. They are one of the few directors with a big catalog where I can say I've seen all of their features. While I still think Near Dark is her best, I was thrilled when she won Best Director for Hurt Locker. I feel like it gets lost in the shuffle after the success/controversy of Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, but her most recent film, Detroit, is their equal.

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