The bomb squad keeps very busy in the Iraq war.

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2015)

For whatever reasons I had not seen this movie until now. Maybe it was the title, "Hurt Locker" doesn't exactly conjure images of an interesting movie. But it DID win a number of awards including the Oscar for Best Picture. With all that I suppose I was expecting more, it is a fine movie but I came away thinking it must have been a weak year for Best picture nominees.
It focuses on a squad that gets alerted to possible bombs and is charged with defusing them or otherwise insuring the safety of the soldiers and surrounding community.
As the movie opens we see one of these that goes bad, the soldier (Guy Pearce in a very brief role) doesn't make it. So the replacement expert comes in. By his own count he has defuses over 800 devices. That is Jeremy Renner as Sergeant First Class William James. He is a maverick, he often goes against the guidance of others but he always seems to succeed.
His closest buddy is Anthony Mackie in a good role as Sergeant JT Sanborn. He is more of a "by the book" soldier and gets frustrated with some of the antics of James.
The third member of that close-knit group is Brian Geraghty as Specialist Owen Eldridge, who seems always fearful that he will get killed, that whatever assignment will be his last one. His growth is to overcome that.
The Iraq war was, and I suppose still is, a terrible thing. This is a good movie to show presumably what one group goes through each day. As the movie starts they have 39 days left in their tour of duty, part of the suspense is if they will live to go home.
SPOILERS: James does get back home to his small child and wife. He shops for cereal, he cleans leaves out of the gutter. His wife seems distant. As the movie ends we see him in military gear, stepping off a transport at the beginning of his 365 day tour. He just couldn't survive in dull civilian life, he needed the action.