Is that what it's like?

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2015)

In war, the people you try to make connections with could die at any time. The people you should connect with at home become remote anecdotes in your life. Your bloody job is all that's left. Thus is Kathryn Bigelow's lesson.
I have never been in the military, so those who have seen it first-hand must comment on the accuracy of "The Hurt Locker." Yet this film feels direct and close to the truth. There are not many adornments, besides what a changing constellation of three men in a bomb squad encounters week after week. The simplicity of reality is powerful in this film.
Yet it is not a documentary. Take the music, for example. A blend of natural sounds from crowd murmur to wind, the chop of helicopters, echoing mid-eastern music, and undertones of menacing deep sounds. It is not a conventional score, but it supports the emotions that arise while viewing this film quite well. It's not easy to find alternatives to the power of a full symphony orchestra when it comes to controlling viewer emotion, but the soundtrack by Jorgensen/Ministry provides such an alternative.
The story itself is linear, as the days in the field roll by in Humvees, and Sargeant James (Jeremy Renner), who loves his job more than anything else left in the world, pushes his squad to the limit. He will abandon the mission disabling a device locked to an Iraqi family man just before detonation, but nothing short of that will deter him. His own child is a total stranger, while an Iraqi teen who plays soccer with him is killed so a body bomb can be sown into his belly.
Paranoia is constant even if 99% of the strangers whose language you don't speak are actually friendly, just trying to get on with their lives. But 99% is not good enough. Could you take a 1% chance of death every day of your life? It's hard for someone who has never seen this up close to imagine what it might be like, but this film is about as good a jog for the imagination as you are going to find. It ranks high among war films because it refrains from glorifying or accusing, judging or preaching. It just lets its soldiers be. All you can be.