The Hurt Locker (2009)
I have been waiting a long time to see The Hurt Locker. I remember getting excited when I noticed the new credit on Kathryn Bigelow's IMDb director's profile three years ago. It was the first movie she would direct after a devastatingly long break following K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). I honestly thought she had retired, but thank God she didn't because The Hurt Locker is her masterpiece, the best film of her career. It is also the best movie I have seen this year and deserves accolades for every aspect of its production, although I doubt it will receive anything outside of the festival circuit. The bottom line is: see this movie. Now.
Kathryn Bigelow is one of the biggest female directors...well...ever. There's not a lot of them, unfortunately. She is also one of my favourite filmmakers and I follow her career with anticipation. It is ironic that the most successful female director chooses to make movies about men. All of her films have decidedly masculine themes and most feature male-heavy casts. The Hurt Locker is the epitome of this, highlighting the final days of the tour of three male soldiers in Iraq, part of an elite bomb disposal unit. It is a job catered to adrenaline junkies seeking the ultimate rush. I hope I am not out-of-line when I suggest that this is most prominently a masculine personality. So yes, The Hurt Locker is about men doing men's work; yet, the film is critical of its protagonists. They make careless mistakes and are often too weak or too strong at both appropriate and inappropriate moments. We get a very personal glimpse at men dealing with a stress that is more than any human being should be subjected to.
There are no clichés in The Hurt Locker, no motivational speeches, or war-is-bad epithets. It barely even qualifies as a war movie. The Hurt Locker follows its characters intimately, but contemporarily. We get brief exerts of who they are in dialogue, but there is no time here for romantic subplots or extraneous story arcs. Every second is calculated like a ticking bomb and every spoken word counts for something important. I like these kinds of movies where everything is purposeful and nothing is wasted. Every piece of the film is meticulously crafted, but three elements make this movie a masterpiece.
The first element is the location. The Hurt Locker was filmed in Jordan: pretty much as close as a film crew can safely get to Iraq while still maintaining a degree of safety. This affords the film an incredible amount of authenticity, especially because so much of the film occurs outdoors in battle-worn streets and barren deserts. The camera catches these locations perfectly and we are never lost.
At the heart of the movie is Staff Sergeant William James and the actor who plays the part, Jeremy Renner. He is an interesting character because he begins the film as the typical reckless, macho hero who enters every situation with confident arrogance. You expect him to make a mistake and learn a lesson. Would it surprise you to learn that his character arc travels in the opposite direction? This male figure, who we are all familiar with, soon becomes deeply complicated and his motivations remain somewhat ambiguous even by the end of the movie. Someone I was speaking to about the movie eloquently described James as a character who begins the movie having already come to the end of a significant character development and we are left to figure out how he got there. But don't expect him to change much during The Hurt Locker. An opening quote proposes "War is a drug." Disarming bombs is the thing James does best, the thing that gives him the most satisfaction and greatest thrill. Adrenaline is the drug and his job provides the vehicle.
By the end of the film, when we finally have James figured out, we realize that we have witnessed a career-making performance from Jeremy Renner. His talent is not wasted on recitations of patriotic verse or motivational proverbs, but instead we watch his skill in the subtle complexities of the human face. His performance is visceral, we feel it more than we hear it.
Suspense is the final element. The "shaky" camera is used prominently in this movie, but not because Bigelow wants to use its unsteady eye to heighten tension. Instead, the "shaky" camera is simply an unavoidable side-effect of the hand-held camera which is used to get closer to the action and to observe a deeper perspective of the scene. The shots last longer than 2 seconds, which is unique for modern action films, but Bigelow wants to earn her suspense with skill and storytelling, not artificial camera movements and lightning-fast edits. Hitchcock would be proud. The Hurt Locker is one of the most intense movies I have ever seen and it accomplishes this without false alarms or predictability. I expect that, like me, you will leave the film exhausted from the action, but there is still much to think about.
I find it offensive that a juvenile mess like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen can make hundreds of millions of dollars while The Hurt Locker has barely made over 2 million. It is an independent film, and must overcome obstacles that don't exist for big studio pictures like advertising and distribution. Still, I asked someone else how much he thought The Hurt Locker cost. The first guess was $125 million. The truth: $11 million. And for $11 million Kathryn Bigelow has shot a far smarter, far more entertaining movie than any other action film this year. Let this be a lesson to the bloated system of excess that is Hollywood: a community that doesn't blink before paying millions for a script that could have been written by a 10-year old. Also, Wikipedia tells me that The Hurt Locker earned more money per screen (4 screens total) on its opening weekend when it competed with the release of Transformers. That's cool.
The final verdict: The Hurt Locker is one of those movies that is truly great on every level, one of those unmissable, required-viewing, soul-shaking movies. This is Kathryn Bigelow's masterpiece: a culmination of all the themes, styles, and questions that attracted her to cinema in the first place.
Professor P
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