Underwhelming and confusing

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2011)

WARNING======THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS=====
The Hurt Locker" is about a US Army bomb disposal crew in Iraq. There's the expectedly tense opening scene in which a crew member gets killed while trying to defuse a bomb. This leads to a new crew member coming on board, Sgt James (Jeremy Renner). Unlike the previous guy, Sgt James is a rebel, a cowboy, a risk taker. He doesn't like to use the robot to first check out potential bomb sites. He prefers to put on the big anti-bomb suit and stroll down there himself and check things out in person. This annoys and scares his crew members.
The movie doesn't provide a lot of structure. The plot is very episodic, with the camera drifting from one situation to another without much exposition. This lack of plot might itself be a plot point – showing how life during war is episodic and unstructured. There's a lot of shaky camera work and the film seems to be trying very hard to look realistic and documentary-like.
The main set pieces of the film are the bomb disarming sequences. They go out in their hum-vee, James finds the bombs, and everybody holds their breath while he assesses the situation and snips a few wires. He finds a bunch of bombs in the trunk of a car, finds one inside a dead body, and even encounters an Iraqi man who is just walking down the street with a bunch of explosives strapped to his body. Iraqi citizens are constantly hanging around, but it's difficult to tell if they're the enemy or just bystanders. Again this might be on purpose, letting the audience experience the uncertainty the soldiers feel every day.
I guess these scenes are tense and unnerving . . . well, maybe for people who don't follow the news from Iraq, or people who have not seen many war films. They didn't do a lot for me.
James and his crew argue. They get drunk and smack each other around when they're off duty. We get the typical scenes of emotional breakdown, how they don't understand why they're fighting, and how civilians can't understand what they're going through.
There's a puzzling scene when they run into a character played by actor Ralph Fiennes and a crew of guys in the desert. Are they soldiers? What are they doing out there? A sniper starts firing at them. Very little is explained.
At one point Renner's character kidnaps an Iraqi man and makes him drive into Bagdad, where he breaks into someone's house while searching for a boy who sold him DVDs. Why did he commit this obvious breach of military etiquette? What does he want from the boy? Who was the guy in the house? Again, very little is explained.
OK, I get it, I get it - soldiers often don't know what's happening during war. Confusion and paranoia reigns. Honestly, I'm not the kind of guy who needs everything spelled out, but this whole movie seems to be a study in "fill in the blanks for yourself".
So, this is the Best Picture winner? Really? Personally I'd have chosen "Precious", "Inglorious Basterds", "Up In The Air", or "Avatar" over this. It's not a bad movie, it's just not very compelling, or even that interesting. We've seen most of this before, done better, with a bit more flair and clarity. I guess it won because of the "Bigelow Factor": the fact that it's a gritty war film directed by a woman. I guess that was Hollywood's "cause de jour" in 2008. "We gotta give an Oscar to a female director!". She did a pretty good job of directing, I guess, but it's nothing special. "The Hurt Locker" left me with one question: "What's all the fuss?".