Strange, powerful and, in a sense, beautiful

Rating: 6/10 (7 February 2012)

The Hurt Locker, by the ultimately competent and highly skilled Kathryn Bigelow, is treated like a newsreel or a semi documentary, à la The Blair Witch Project. This shaky, many times soft-focused (or just plain out of focus) camera, gives the movie some sort of immediacy, a kind of weird impression of testimony, where the viewer feels he's participating of the action or, at the very least, is seeing a very real event. Focused mainly in the disorders the war introduces in soldiers personalities, Bigelow does her very best to portray the fears, the guilts and, perhaps, the straightforward psychosis they suffer, but, in my opinion, fails to deliver the sense of commitment and sacrifice that, in the very deep, justifies the volunteering they professed. Nice Irak War movie, well acted and of course very well directed, THL shows nice special appearances by Guy Pearce, Evangeline Lilly, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes, despite the fact these are little more than cameos. The weakest point in its scrip is —no doubt about this— the almost unbelievable and plainly ridiculous declaration of principles and philosophy of war analysis towards the end, not because of who makes it, but because of who is this paragraph directed to. Six stars out of ten, mostly because the perfect timing, excellent mise-en-scène and great directing, and because, you know, this is the beautiful and intelligent Bigelow. Worth watching if you can tolerate some unconventional and original narrative resources and techniques.