Great character study, deals with interesting theme, yet not perfect

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2010)

The Hurt Locker follows a group of Bravo soldiers who deal with IED (improvised explosive devices). The film starts off with a devastating sequence in which the leader of the current unit is killed while trying to disarm a bomb, and the survivors of the unit, Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), are forced to work with the reckless, selfish and arrogant Sgt. William James Ranger (Jeremy Renner) who puts both their lives into danger every time he goes out to diffuse a bomb. Yet Ranger is still the hero, mainly because we get to see how good of a person he really is. The film is filled with tense moments, and the characters of the film know that every second they are out in Baghdad disarming bombs could easily be their last, making this movie one of the more suspenseful war movies I have ever seen.
While Renner and Mackie both give incredible and strong performances, the real hero in this film is Kathryn Bingelow. She is not out to state a political message about Iraq (like Home of the brave or Stop-loss), or even a social commentary about adaption, surprisingly it's a raw look at what life in war is really like. The violence is not explicit like in most war movies; the violence comes within each person, as they count down the hours to go home, or simply countdown to their own deaths, and put their lives in danger for each other. The film is a character study in which the quote "war is a drug" follows the characters like a shadow, showing us how these soldiers can see war as a thrilling excitement and how they can grow to hate it (like most drug addicts do). While the core of The Hurt Locker lies within its character's motivations, the hand- held camera shots and the focus correction make every second more the squad spends in the scene more daring and confusing. We mainly see through the eyes of the soldiers, but that also means that we see how they are in constant danger of death. In one scene when Ranger has to disarm a bomb in a car, both Sanborn and Eldridge get surrounded by viewers, and as we saw in the first scene, you can never tell the difference between a viewer and someone with a remote explosion device. By letting us see through their eyes, and creating chaos through camera movement and desperation, she creates a tense atmosphere which recalls hell more than Iraq. This technique gets interesting as she repeats it throughout the film and makes us realize that Ranger is putting the two lower ranked soldiers in danger, and we want to hate him but we can't. Renner gives a very charismatic and sometimes even heart-warming performance that shows how even some extremely well-hearted people get corrupted and addicted to war.
The theme of addiction to war is what makes this film unique and one of the best of its kind. Ranger is not a misfit to society (recall Born on fourth of July, or Stop-loss for that matter) who doesn't know what life is like outside war. No, on the contrary, he appreciates life outside war, but simply cannot live it. The struggle for adrenaline and those seconds or minutes when he faces death are the only ones that make sense to him anymore. Most people hate war, but he loves it. And the most unsettling part of it is that we can understand where he is coming from! We felt the tension he did when diffusing those bombs, and even if we were worried about death, we felt the need to grasp to our life as hard as we could. That is the magic about Bingelow's film, she made us appreciate life and at the same time understand why soldiers put theirs in danger to one extent or the other. This could be interpreted as anti- war message, but because of the final sequence we see that she doesn't have an agenda, she is just showing us what true life is like in war. We draw our own conclusions. It's magically terrific to understand these characters, and that's what makes it a great war movie.
So is this movie perfect or what? Unfortunately no. It's hard to believe that one simple squad consisting of three people would do all the things their squad did. It's like watching CSI: Iraq, they do everything, and that is not how war works. Also, there is a sub-plot involving a child that is never fully wrapped, we are left to conclude it ourselves, but explaining the confusion of that plot could have helped us understand Ranger more, although I think that has more to do with script than directing. Apart from that, the cinematography is top-notch, Renner is amazing and I want to see him in more films, and the music is also perfect. This film is a great war movie, and I recommend it to everyone.
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