War Is All-Consuming.

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2009)

There is not much about The Hurt Locker that hasn't already been said by nearly unanimous critics and audiences, but being such a feverishly subjective experience, one is bound to have brought one's own relative fears, perceptions and sense of both surprise and inevitability to the experience oneself. Regardless of where those reactions individually come from and the relationship they have with a given scene, that in itself is the experience of the soldier in combat. The actors on screen do not work from prose monologues but through instinctive reckonings of who they are and what they feel. They are not good fighting evil. They see less good and more evil in everyone and everything with each passing day.
Kathryn Bigelow has always been a very skillful director of Hollywood action movies. But this is a whole different beast. She has certainly put her hand to varying themes, settings and subgenres before, but The Hurt Locker is in a class all by itself as the film where she has focused every fiber of her ability into fashioning a unique, unfettered film. Yes, an uber-masculine action film, a film about the Iraq War, but rarely are we so unaware of the distance between ourselves and the screen. It is not just the only film about the war to have been successful thus far, it is an experience she has fought tooth and nail to give us.
There are two name actors in the film. One of them dies in the very first scene and the other appears for a minute or less near the end. Otherwise, we spend the film's protracted duration in the unadulterated presence of actors we may or may not have seen before, unable to comfort ourselves by connecting them with other roles in other films. There are no masks of stardom any more than there are facades of set design or non-diagetic visual effects. We inevitably believe that they are not acting at all, that they are living the very lives and doing the very things on screen.
The film was shot by United 93 cinematographer Barry Ackroyd with hand-held 16mm cameras, usually with four cameras rolling at once. It is gritty, grimy, saturated in sweat, overexposure, underexposure, and the expansion beyond dualism. This is the way we believe the bomb squad's experiences look and feel, because that is the way we undergo our physical day-to-day existence, by looking at the small, representative systems and the entire complex structure at the same time. The eye always has and always will see conflictingly with the lens, though with various focal lengths and an energetic editing approach---indeed you are guaranteed to never feel aware of a cut---the lens gives us that mutual negotiation of opposing perspectives, which inescapably embodies the sense of complete involvement.
It isn't just the self-contained plays depicting the three conflicting sergeants in the bomb unit diffusing improvised explosives that have our hearts in our throats. The building rage and paranoia pervades every moment. One night, the three sergeants, played by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, who never completely like or hate each other, get more wasted than anybody I've ever seen and take turns smashing each other in the stomach. But this is not quite aggressive enough to satisfy one of them, Renner's Sergeant First Class William James, who lives and breathes confrontation with potentially fatal threats the way a drug addict is never satisfied with more than enough of their substance. He is not bad or cruel. He is not easily offended, he is gregarious and honest. But he is like that in the field as well, such as when he insists on approaching a suspected bomb without first sending a bomb disposal robot on his first mission with this company.
Bigelow will never be the same filmmaker she was before. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Strange Days are exciting thrillers, and they demonstrate her flair for atmosphere, but at the helm of The Hurt Locker, she demonstrates an outright mastery and total understanding of the effects of the camera, the mental creation of the third shot when one shot cuts to the next, and the most unequivocally honest application of life's sights and sounds to those of cinema. She has the brass balls to take a subject matter proved to be box office poison and give it her relentless all.