One of the best war films ever made!

Rating: Null/10 (11 September 2009)

I'm a career Army Sergeant who will retire in three years. I usually get a big laugh when I watch movies about the military because they get it all wrong. I watch and say to myself "it isn't like that in real life, these filmmakers don't know what they're doing". I saw The Hurt Locker tonight at my base theater and want to salute a great filmmaker named Kathryn Bigalow and I sing her praises with fervor. She should join the ranks of Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket), Oliver Stone (Platoon) and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocolypse Now) as a director who made one of the greatest war films ever. I have never seen a film that so realistically captured the horror of combat and the endless hell Soldiers in combat experience. Sergeant James and his fellow Soldiers aren't Rambo or Sergeant Stryker. They are just human beings who want to stay alive and go home. You feel their fear and smell their sweat, Bigalow makes it that real. I served in Operation Desert Storm as a young National Guardsman and this film brought back memories and had me on the edge of my seat more then once. This film has won excellent reviews and raves from audiences and there is truth in advertising. I am so glad I made the decision to see it. I had never heard of any of the actors in the film, but they all do outstanding work. The only thing is that Sergeant James attitude at first got on my nerves. I was thinking that I wouldn't feel safe with him in combat. He grew on me though. SPOILER ALERT I felt so sorry for that young Specialist that had his leg shot up in the end. He had every right to chew out Sergeant James. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. Sergeant James couldn't save that man rigged with the bomb in the end and I know that hurt him, but he made it home to his wife and child and then decided to go back to Iraq? What was he thinking. No happy ending here. Well like they said in Platoon, innocence is the real casualty of war.