Real life Rambos need more questions to answer (and screw accuracy)

Rating: 7/10 (14 April 2010)

When The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for Best Film, Directing and Screenplay, a lot of people were surprised. Not that it wasn't a hot candidate, but certain critics and others in-the-know didn't see it coming anyway. It seemed, a critic wrote somewhere, as if the jury of the Academy suddenly voted from their hearts, giving the Oscar to a low budget (in fact, in Oscar terms, record-breakingly low budget) film instead of what the industry begged for (that is to say Avatar). The choice of The Hurt Locker seemed somewhat more honest, more daring, more true to the quality of cinema.
I'd have to object, your honor. That would have been true if they'd given it to Precious. Or, in another way, even Inglourious Basterds. The Hurt Locker surely is a meager looking winner of 6 Oscars, but there's really more than enough Academy material in it. It's a war movie. It's about an imperfect man trying to do good and facing the confusion when this doesn't properly work out. In continuation, it's about America doing the same thing in Iraq. It doesn't take sides. It asks questions in a moderately wise fashion. It's a little teary and it's a little amusing when it's not serious or Speech Time-ish. I'm not putting this down, though. Just saying.
The main character of the film is Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) who attends Delta Company in Iraq. His job is to defuse bombs, which is something he does, one must assume, better than anybody else. He is very reckless and Gung Ho, and not what you'd call immediately likable. He is so focused on disarming his bombs he doesn't seem to understand or care that there's people around him and that they are all in life threatening danger. His first day on the job earns him a punch in the face from his second sergeant. As the film progresses, we begin to understand that he is one of those self made war machines who cannot function in the real world any longer and thus comes to live for fighting in the frontier. He's not John Rambo, a character with the same problem, but I suspect he might think he is. Some of the best bits of the film involves scenes where he loses his illusions about war heroism. As one might imagine, they have a lot to do with children.
The Hurt Locker is a good film, but I must admit I'm surprised at how easily impressed the critics have been with it. The good things are easy to point out - It is professional and well made, exactly the type of proper job Kathryn Bieglow has been known for in the past, and it is well acted - Jeremy Renner does as much as can be done with this character I believe, and Anthony Mackie balances him with a counter-role as Sanborn, the other sergeant. The best scenes involve them speaking in a realistic fashion. I know nothing of warfare, but as far as I know this is how people talk in real life no matter where. I really liked just about every scene they shared that didn't have any guns in it.
The "bad" stuff isn't really bad as much as it's "not good enough". Most of the content of the film is old fashioned war clichés - the good man in the bad land, slightly psychotic commanding officers, naive well- educated peacemakers, the hero who befriends the child, the could-be- innocent could-be-evil arab who wanders up when he's told to step back, basically the Cowboys and the Indians. However, I'm pretty sure that Biegelow and screenwriter Mark Boal knows about this too. I could be wrong of course, but the point of our main hero's escapades into the civilian Iraquee crowds to somehow attempting to find the "bad guys" vigilante style, seems self-aware, rather than honest. But the film never really gets high enough, though. It has about three or four really good and memorable big moments, but in between there's not a clear focus on what this film really is about. My guess is that Boal and Biegelow didn't want to go over the line of a kind of journalistic line of objectiveness, but it wouldn't have hurt if they did. I find it a pity that a film that's obviously very intelligent won't go even further in it's own questions.
I can understand most of the criticism The Hurt Locker has received, apart from one thing and that's the pointless rants about inaccuracy. This is in general a critique I have never understood, and when it comes to war films I knew from the moment I saw The Deer Hunter and experienced the tremendous impact that film had on me, that it was a completely worthless to question if it was "accurate" or not. Accuracy has nothing to do with it. No film is accurate. It's a film. Only our feelings for them are accurate.