Katherine Bigelow's new Iraq War film has essentially everything I want to find when I go to the movies. There's action, drama, good characters, some humor, and perhaps most of all, balls-out intensity.
Set in Baghdad in 2004, The Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner as "reckless" Staff Sergeant Will James, a bomb technician who has just joined Bravo Company, an outfit with 39 days left in its current deployment. Bravo is led by the by-the-books Sergeant JT Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie. Brian Geraghty plays the company's traumatized Specialist, Eldridge.
I've always said that a movie is never as good as it could've been when the audience walks out knowing what happened, but not remembering the characters' names. It's safe to say that I knew a lot more than names when leaving the movie theater today. Somehow, between the gut-wrenchingly intense scenes on the streets of Baghdad, Bigelow and journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal have managed to do what even renowned war films like Black Hawk Down sometimes fail to. We get to know these characters, we care about them, and we want to know if they'll live to see the next scene.
The impressive character development is well-complemented by a hefty bag of intensity that never seems to let up throughout the two hours and 10 minutes that comprise The Hurt Locker. I would imagine defusing bombs in real life is quite the intense process, and The Hurt Locker seems to capture it expertly, with an appropriately hushed soundtrack and camerawork that makes the audience feel like a pack of embedded journalists.
All this is made into a complete package by the storytelling. This is a movie about characters, not politics. Think what you will about the two big 9/11 movies that came uncomfortably soon after that terrible day (Paul Greengrass' United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center), but they rightly shifted their respective focuses away from politics. The Hurt Locker does the same, allowing the audience to glean its own conclusions about the war and concentrate on the characters and the action.
The Hurt Locker is the only film I've seen this summer that has done pretty much everything right. An intense film is made all the more so by the fact that the characters within that intensity are ones we care about. It's a movie that knocks you off your feet and makes you hurry to get back on them, because you won't want to miss a second of The Hurt Locker.
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