Gripping despite inaccuracies

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2010)

This film is being taken to task here by Iraq veterans, who point out everything it gets wrong. One of my students, also a vet, did so without having seen it -- he can't stand war movies for that very reason. I've seen enough of them so that even while watching, and despite the authentic-looking hand-held cinematography, I could guess the movie was at some remove from nuts and bolts reality, like most.
Overlook that, however, and it's still a dramatically powerful tale of conflict and bonding between the three men of the crew. All three leads are excellent, with Jeremy Renner standing out as the obsessed bomb defusing expert. The scenes of neutralizing the bombs, while casing the area for anyone ready to remotely detonate them, accurate or not, are fiercely suspenseful exercises in making viewers bite their nails. (Scenes about defusing bombs always work, no matter how hokey. There was even a good one on the old "M*A*S*H" series.)
I think the film gets something else right, too, though I realize as a non-vet I'm going out on a limb. From the start, we experience these characters as strangers in a strange and hostile land, aware that they're to some extent engendering hatred and thus more danger. Renner says after one Iraqi is wrestled to the ground: "If he wasn't an insurgent, he is now." The sense of fear and panic pervades every scene away from the military compound.
It's a bit overlong; the missions grow repetitive. Perhaps it could have done without the obviously far-fetched subplot in which Renner goes off alone at night on a mission of his own. Yet the brief, non-explosive coda to that adventure, a few scenes later, is stunning, driving home the point that no matter how well-intentioned, Renner's character only thinks he knows and understands the place where he's serving. That makes sense in terms of the film's conclusion, where we see the real reason why he's there.
In sum: see it for the intensity of the acting and the suspense, and as a non-politicized critique of the war. Unless of course you're a vet, in which case you're excused. (More than one of you will hopefully do what Oliver Stone did with "Platoon" someday and set the record straight.)