The Hurt Locker, Movie Review

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The Hurt Locker: 4 (on a scale of 1 low to 4 high )

In this study of a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq in 2004, director Kathryn Bigelow grabs us by the throat in the first few minutes and never lets go. I find myself tempted to say this is the best war movie I’ve ever seen, though spending much thought on art as a competition can become as wrong-headed as the Oscars are. So I'll just say I don’t remember feeling any more involved in the elite films of this genre—for example, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Platoon—than I was during Hurt Locker.

Original but not self-conscious in technique, the action scenes, along with the landscape of a distressed city and its inhabitants, feel absolutely immediate and real. Ditto the desert scenes. There is some gore, though not the mindless exploitation of it that I've come to expect in action movies. More prominent is the interplay among the three main characters, which poses important questions about leadership, friendship, recklessness and responsibility, courage, grace under pressure, loyalty, obedience, heroism, the independent personality--and, always one of my favorites: when and how a character can seem both arrogant and sympathetic.

Toward the end of the movie, I find two problems, neither of them fatal. First, there are indications of the probable outcomes of two of the three main characters. Why not the third, who might be the noblest of the group? Did I miss a line?

Secondly, there’s a bit of drift toward didacticism, or at least summarizing. However, it is fairly well controlled, never develops into full-blown propaganda, lasts for only five or ten minutes, and doesn’t even begin to override the method that has dominated: action, and imagery, and characters revealing themselves without a lot of instruction from the script on how we should feel or what we should think.

If you assume this will be, or should be, a facile anti-Bush or “War is Hell” flick, stop supposing and go see an admirable effort to avoid both glorification and condemnation. The Hurt Locker is closer to work than play for an audience; good art requires more effort and attention than entertainment does. But see it anyway. It's a disturbing wealth of visual and psychological experience, concerning some of humanity's oldest, most troubling themes.