No more reliance on Academy Awards

Rating: 5/10 (31 December 2012)

So many war movies since Apocalypse Now are required to have a crazy soldier as the theme. This is another one.
With all its awards I expected this to be an outstanding movie - it is not.
I have read a lot of war books and I'll watch movies considered "boring" by others, just to see what I might learn. In this case however I shut it off twice coming back to it later.
As others have said, it has no plot, no story. Since it was based on the writer's experience embedded with a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, clearly he had good material. The trouble is he needed help writing it - more help than he received from the director - the co-writer.
For example, they might have taken a young boy of the American mid-west, who lost a relative in a mine explosion. Young man joins the Army, lacks direction, a grizzled old sergeant steers him into bomb disposal. They go to Iraq, he becomes seasoned by some small successes. He grows up, the old sergeant gets killed, one day a unit is pinned down and a bomb hinders their rescue. He goes in, defuses it with minutes to spare. Formulaic? Maybe, but at least it has a beginning, middle and end.
And while I can believe that the bomb disposal team might know the rudiments of being a combat infantryman, these guys seemed to be experts in everything. Not believable.
Watch this movie for a realistic depiction of a bomb squad in action. Fast forward through any scene that doesn't have a gun in it.