All Shook Up

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2010)

I very likely would have given THE HURT LOCKER a 9 if I had been able to see the work that Kathryn Bigelow's production team had done. Unfortunately, the decision to go with the "realism" of a hand-held camera throughout, often involving abrupt pans and focus shifts (even when filming two stationary people conversing) resulted in some of the most self-consciously awful cinematography I've ever seen. What is constructed to be a high stakes chase scene, consists entirely of characters, or what we presume to be characters, making blurry light smudges across the screen. It's really a shame because Bigelow, whose innovative take on the vampire genre NEAR DARK and turn of the millennium sci-fi STRANGE DAYS made her a director to watch, has once again led the pack by turning the day-to-day work of a bomb disposal unit into a nail-biting evocation of asymmetrical warfare. To say THE HURT LOCKER has a documentary feel gives documentary cinematography a bad name. Steadicam anyone?