The Hurt Locker
Dir: Kathryn Bigelow
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Summit Entertainment
131 Minutes
You can have it all at your disposal - giant robots, swarms of aliens, enormous tidal waves engulfing the world - but it's all going to amount to a wasted opportunity in the end if you don't know how to shoot it. One of the most striking things about {The Hurt Locker}, almost certainly destined to be the best action movie of this summer, is its simplicity. Kathryn Bigelow's dual commitments to precision and realism allow her to make full use of the tension inherent in her scenarios. Using Ken Loach's regular cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, Bigelow harnesses his experience as a naturalistic shooter to create a feeling of concise reality; the camera moves in a searching, verité style, but happens upon its objects of concern seamlessly, with a minimum of the artificially jittery bullshit typified by this approach.
All of the action sequences in this film are carefully blocked and staged; despite the up close and fragmented shooting style, the exact sense of the scenes' geography and movement is never uncertain. This strong sense of space is one of the movie's greatest assets, taken full advantage of to ramp up tension in scenes, creating a palpable distance between the soldier defusing a bomb and his squadmates trying to cover him as best they can while standing hundreds of feet away, at the edge of the blast zone. The simultaneous efficiency and grace of this film's construction is a sight to behold, and it harkens back to an earlier, more tactile era of moviemaking, when things happened in front of cameras instead of green screens.
A bit pointed at times, The Hurt Locker opens with a caption stating "war is a drug." It mostly ignores this idea for its duration, and it's better for it, because the movie is strongest when it's not staying on message but rather, staying on point. Talking about the horrors of war isn't anywhere near as effective a galvanizing force against it as showing them, after all. The effect war has on its participants is another of the film's concerns, with its opening quote mainly serving to describe Jeremy Renner's Staff Sergeant William James, an explosives technician who's defused nearly 1,000 bombs. He joins a squad near the end of its combat cycle and immediately begins to alienate himself from his two squad mates, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) through reckless behavior and a seeming disregard for self-preservation. He clearly knows what he's doing, but his brashness goes beyond jaded experience, it seems like maybe above all else he just doesn't care anymore about his life.
James, Sanborn and Eldridge all do their best to keep it together through their last month of service, and the film mostly chronicles their time through the intense situations they face, a collection of set-pieces connected by smaller scenes designed to further develop the characters. There is no real narrative in the day-to-day life these men face, just a series of discrete, dangerous situations. The structure of the film alone makes it clear how maddening this life can be, and the images of the soldiers unwinding between missions by getting epically drunk and beating the shit out of each other, or "joking" with an Iraqi kid about coming back to sever his head with a dull knife if the DVD he sold is subpar, prove the point well enough. No mind can sustain the weight of this unending regimen of violence, and the ones in this film are either nearly crushed or permanently disfigured by the experience. Bigelow's ambivalent action film brings us the excitement of war and the shame that comes with it.
by Andrei Alupului