Fascination with war's futility

Rating: 10/10 (16 August 2009)

Some films transport you to a world so completely that for a time you enter the minds and hearts of those the film seeks to portray. It is interesting that it has taken the genius of a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, to evoke for our time the soul destroying futility of the world that men make, the world of war. We see the war in Iraq through the eyes of a bomb disposal crew. It is a micro view of a massive tragedy scarring the current generation of young American and British men who have been put "in harm's way", to use that awful euphemism for those who risk their lives for the dreams of silver haired politicians, many of whom made sure they were never in a place of greater harm than the golf course.
We learn in the first minute of the film that "war is a drug". Its insidious allure creates moments of extraordinary bravery. But those who get high on that particular drug, the 'wild men' who know they are alive when their lives are in great peril, lose something very precious. This is touched on seemingly in passing in the film, but is perhaps the main motif.
The three key actors are excellent in portraying that mix of despair and elation, courage and abject fear that perhaps have been the soldiers' lot since time immemorial. In particular the acting of Jeremy Renner, as staff sergeant William James, is powerfully convincing.
Some moments in this film create a tension as high as that of the most eloquent work of Hitchcock or Michael Mann. The enemy are ever present because any ordinary citizen of Iraq could be that enemy. Yet Bigelow avoids making these enemies super villains; they are just the other side in a life destroying endeavour that the film does not seek to explain, because for the troops on the ground, such explanation is virtually futile.
For me this film is a perfect example of its genre, the intelligent war movie, and deserves to be seen widely and thought about deeply.