The Nerve-Wracking Routine of Daily Bomb-Defusing Missions...

Rating: 9/10 (10 March 2017)

The Height of Suspense is When Any Second Can Turn the Place into Chaos or Not It is quite ironic that the very year the Academy decided to extend the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten didn't have more than three or four real gems to endorse. It is as if "The Hurt Locker" became the embodiment of a weak year and didn't win Oscars but rather stole them from more deserving movies like "Avatar" or "Inglourious Basterds". Kathryn Bigelow took her former husband's Oscar for Best Directing and the film won the Best Picture while that should have belonged to Tarantino at least, according to IMDb Top 250, not me, anyway.
Less flashy and more powerful than Tarantino's work, "The Hurt Locker" is a simple, straightway journey that chronicles the missions of the bomb squad in Iraq during the first years of that infamous war that shouldn't have happened. That this war is deemed as pointless and meaningless is a reality perfectly captured through two of the third leading characters Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Vietnam War wasn't more meaningful and the GI's weren't much loved, but all through "The Hurt Locker", the squad deals with a new kind of warfare, one that turned the city into a giant hideout for bombs, of any sorts and any devices trapped in the most banal and sneaky places, such as car trunks, trash bins and even dead bodies.
This is a war where the enemy is invisible because once the bomb is there, whoever put it can be anywhere, he can even be close to the soldiers or staring at them from the top of a mosque or a building, it is a task of Herculean level to spot the bomber, and most of the time, they get away with it, because the staff generally deals with the bombs, the sources of never-ending stress. You can disarm a bomb on Monday, another one will still await you on Tuesday, there's no such thing as calling it a day or taking a break, there's never a routine, each bomb is new, each one can be the last one, and the film opens with a specialist (Guy Pearce) killed in a mission, proving that this job is almost like life, you are only remembered for you final achievements, and no matter how many bombs you defused, you'll be an expert or a hero for as long as you survive.
When the rotation is over, you can get back to life but if someone believes this is a consolation thing, he's got another notion coming to him. This is a day-by day situation, it maintains a state of demented stress among the soldiers and this is the hellish aspect of the Iraqi War. There's not a week now without news about a terrorist attack in Iraq, it became a common practice, and in a way, the Americans who were there had a taste of what the civilians must go through now, and they don't even have a rotation to count on. A war movie can't ignore the state of mind as much as it can't ignore the state of war, and from the editing, the way the camera switches places, go back and forth, flying over a vast place where anything is possible, we can have an
taste of the nervousness the soldiers go through, when any second can turn places into chaos.
But had "The Hurt Locker" focused on the danger, it would have been a routine war movie. In "The Hurt Locker", danger is brilliantly diluted in reality, it even ceases to exist, except from the way it is anticipated by soldiers, and above them all, the new Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). This is a hero in the sense that he defused more hundreds of s bombs, and developed a sort of instinct, a capacity for observation and understanding that make him take impossible risks, much to the anger of his two companions (Sanborn even contemplated the idea of killing James) but they can't complain because he's competent. The film opens with a quotation about war being a drug, and it's never as palpable as when you see the concentrated eyes on Renner's face, his no-nonsense way to deal with bombs, with his ordinary looks that recall a young Jim Belushi. This is a guy with an attitude but never gratuitous, he earns his cockiness.
The action is repetitive but never redundant, one of the most archetypal action-movie situation is explored to the fullest, repeated as many times as it takes to have the ultimate psychological effect on the trio, pushing their perceptions to the edge, until they start reconsider their own certitudes, and the common thread is always James, a competent man who wanders in hell thanks to the one thing he loves: defusing bombs. And there's nothing more exhilarating than a character who's really good at something. James is one of them, and we love the film for that paradoxical feel, as much as we're happy not to be in his boots, we admire him and wish we could be as expert in any field as he is, this is guy who found what he loves and acts accordingly too, it's a job full of adrenaline or risks.
See, "The Hurt Locker" is a complex movies with a relative visual simplicity, at a first stance, it is about soldiers assigned the same mission in a hostile place, when you dig deeper, it's about men doing their job, not out of love of patriotism, but because that's what they feel they're meant to do, or what they're meant to do. There's no escape, they can only count on luck, and let time do the job, their life is like a ticking bomb, and they all hope for the explosion to come as late as possible, or at least, to expect it when it comes.