Pieces of a film and a spoon fed point make this less then the sum of its parts

Rating: 6/10 (31 December 2009)

Story of the last 38 days of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq before they are rotated back to the United States. The story follows the group as a new disposal expert joins the squad and upsets things with an almost devil may care attitude that upsets the two men who are suppose to watch over him while he defuses the bombs. The film is essentially a series of six or seven missions and some related activity that takes them closer and closer to the time they are suppose to go home and shows the changing dynamic between the men.
Probable front runner for the Oscar has been consistently on the best of year lists of almost every film critic. Knowing this going into my seeing the film last evening I knew I was going in with a rather large chip on my shoulder concerning the film. I was expecting a major achievement. What I got was a good, solid film from Kathryn Bigelow, probably her best films, but not really one of the best films of the year.
Forgive me I'm kind of at a loss as to what to say since the film didn't really strike me as anything that is all that special. It is essentially a series of set pieces over the course of just over a month. As small little pieces the film works very well since one is never really sure how things will play out. However after the second or so mission I suddenly realized that the film was rather formulaic in its construction with the same thing happening (with two variations) over and over again. The result for me was a film that held me for the pieces but never really amounted to much over all. (An aside, one thing that really bothered me about the film, and made it seem like nothing but pieces, is that there is no sense of any place beyond the immediate. We are at the bomb site or this one street, or this stretch of desert or this room. There is no sense of the world outside of that one spot for that one sequence. Military base? no its a room? There are no places only sets, like the film which is not a whole film but set pieces) Ultimately I don't get the film. I got a good way in and I realized that I had kind of stopped caring. It seems that the whole point of the film is as the film says at the beginning, that war is a drug and that some people need to have that to feel alive. But at the same time we're told that at the beginning and then basically we watch as that plays out with little variation to the end when the final coda reinforces that point of view. Perhaps if Bigelow had put the statement at the end of the film instead of the beginning I would have felt less spoon fed. In all honesty what strikes me about the film thematically is that film feels like it should be about something more than the one thing, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is.
The cast is good, though any one going in with the intention of seeing the so called big stars, Guy Pearce, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, should be warned that most are little more than extended cameos and that its was wrong to list them over the title. The real star is Jeremy Renner at Sgt James, the bomb disposal expert.He's very good at being the hot shot loose canon who is extremely capable at what he does, even to the point of scaring his men.(And I think the anger at his tactics by some in the military is well founded since I think some of his moves would get him killed faster then one can say Jack Robinson) I'm trying to figure out how it fits into the rapidly growing Iraq/ Afghan war sub-genre. Certainly its one of the least clichéd, we don't have the convoy ambushed in a narrow street scene anywhere in it, then again its scenes of barracks life could have been swapped out to any number of other films. Since it actually deals with soldiers in the field its one of a small number of films that actually stay in the field the entire time (most films tend to deal largely with the home front). I would say that it one of the better films (and its far away from the worst which is probably Brian DePalma's Redacted).
Ultimately its a good, but not great film. Its more the sort of film that you'll like but walk away from scratching your head about.