Excellent movie but is it misunderstood?

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2010)

I saw this movie when it first came out, and absolutely loved it -- that is, my opinion, expressed below, is not swayed by hype, awards, etc. That said, I'm surprised that this movie is getting so much flack in the comments here. Many are complaining that this movie is not realistic: very few movies/ war movies/ movies about war are, but since many of us are actually living through the Iraq war, it is easy to point out inaccurate details. Still, it's a movie, it should NOT be taken as a documentary. (Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket: which of these is at all realistic?). And if one ignores the inaccuracies, this movie is absolutely amazing. For me, although it remained silent politically and morally, it really bluntly addressed the question that almost 99% of all action movies avoid to answer honestly: it answered the question, "why do they do it?" Countless (hollywood) movies are devoted ONLY to the depiction of the conquest of a powerful male over an equally powerful enemy. Their motivation can be anything from altruism to saving a loved one. Hurt Locker answered this question in a rather original way (ie, they do it because they like it -- war is a drug). For the people who say it is boring -- I can only imagine that they thought ice cream was boring when they were children. The scene where James pulls up a wire-- and five bombs, connected to it, surface...and then he says "interesting" -- that scene is amusing, hilarious and cutting in how tense it is. It is a great scene among many other great scenes. Take the famous slow motion explosion as well. When you look at a mediocre movie like Sherlock Holmes, where a massive explosion makes you feel nothing visceral or mental, and when you look at the showering and ripples of gravel in the explosion in the hurt locker, you know which movie towers over the other. I am also very surprised by the subjectivity of judgment this movie is inducing in people. Comments are either complaining about the movie depicting soldiers as loathsome and brutal, or as overly cool and virtuous. To me, the characters were neither truly good nor evil, and very much built around the idea of an action movie (in fact, one can say that Hurt Locker is more about the idea of an action movie than it is about the Iraq war). They do not express tender emotions, and their morals are largely the morals of someone built for war and conflict: they do not shrink from fighting and killing. Sure, these are the traits of psychopaths, but they are really the hallmarks of most action movies, except most action movies also have another thing to balance out the bloodlust: the people being killed are "evil." Hurt Locker is not a contemplative movie, it is not uplifting, and it not the depiction of a fight between good and evil. It is a depiction of pure conflict and violence, from an arbitrary side and of a more or less arbitrary individual. My best guess is that this movie annoyed people because there was no one really to root for or comfortably identify with. Greenzone (which is a darn good movie) might be better for them, I guess.