War as entertainment

Rating: 7/10 (8 January 2012)

Kathryn's Bigelow's film 'The Hurt Locker' tells the story of a bomb disposal engineer in Iraq. It's long, but consistently gripping: however, does it deserve the hatful of Oscars it won? War films are hardly scarce, after all, and much of the basic narrative here is familiar, including the sense of alienation from civilian life felt by hardened soldiers. And aspects of this movie just didn't ring true for me. Most accounts of war tell of long periods of tedium interspersed by odd moments of acute fear and danger; but in this film, whenever the bomb disposal squad get a new mission, there's someone trying to kill them as they undertake it, or at the very least some idiot with an inexplicable desire to walk into the barrel of a gun. Post-war Iraq was (and sadly remains) a dangerous place; but overall, U.S. casualty rates are not as high (I think) as this film suggests. And the absence of any interest in why the war was fought, or in why some Iraqis might have wanted Americans dead, feels like a mistake: instead, we get countless set piece scenes of the heroes against the gooks - the fact that it's bomb disposal, rather than infantry fighting, that's nominally the subject, doesn't change this in any fundamental way. Perhaps I was unfortunate to watch this at the same time as I was reading Karl Maplantes 'Matterhorn', a novel set in the Vietnam war; that seems truthful and shocking to me, where this film seems more like entertainment. A cynic might suggest this is actually why the Oscars were won.