Good film but very overrated!

Rating: 7/10 (9 February 2010)

In my opinion, the best two films of 2009 were Inglourious Basterds and Avatar. I saw The Hurt Locker with an open mind, and although I don't like Iraq war movies that much now ... I felt as a film enthusiast that I should see it of course.
I was hugely disappointed because of all the praise and accolades, and it didn't live up to the hype. Clearly this is a much more of a critics movie than public movie, I mean the general movie goer (see ratings on IMDb) prefers films like Avatar or Inglourious Basterds.
That doesn't say anything about quality, because quality and quantity don't have to go together, even though they sometimes do. I simply couldn't watch The Hurt Locker and be amazed. This was a story of guys defusing bombs, few scenes put together along with one non-defusing bomb seen in the desert. And yeah... the main character's relationship with a young Iraq boy. That relationship was never fully explained or thorough enough for me to care.
Jeremy Renner is a good actor, but being nominated so much for this role ... beyond my understanding. I couldn't emotionally connect with the story. I felt more excitement in Bigelow's Strange Days, which I also found as a better film.
The film appears to have reached the status of Brokeback Mountain or L.A. Confidential where nobody dared publicly saying: Hey, these are good movies but they aren't that good. (By the way, L.A. Confidential is by far the best movie of those three). And I don't like such statuses ... they put the film on too high pedestal and the fall will be high. Is there something groundbreaking about The Hurt Locker? No. The subject may be a bit different side to the war in Iraq, but still (to me) this is good film about something I'm so tired of.
I can accept that the film has so and so many nominations, and for too many pretentious critics, this is supposed to be the film of the year. But Oscar nominations for Renner and for the music are fantastically strange. And if the film wins (which is very likely) I would dare say that I haven't been so disappointed with the Academy for its choice in a long time.