The main draw for me with this one was director Kathryn Bigelow, who I've been a fan of since I was a kid when I saw her vampire masterpiece Near Dark.
The Hurt Locker works first and foremost, as an absolute white-knuckle actioner. In terms of other thrillers and action movies this year, none can hold a candle to its sustained tension, wrung not from CGI spectacle, but from crack editing and pacing. As a character drama, I think it's maybe a little less successful, but Bigelow doesn't seem to engage in heavy-handed character psychology, so this isn't a real misstep, she makes action movies and that's exactly what this is.
A lot of Internet trolls and a few critics have blasted Bigelow, accusing her of taking a gung-ho approach to the Iraq war and engaging in propagandist politics (or perhaps abandoning political correctness). Tarantino came under similar fire for his perceived handling of World War 2 with Basterds. I guess they've come to this conclusion because the movie doesn't seem to be stridently anti-war (like most war movies are supposed to be I guess) and her characters never really resort to sentiments like "I gotta get out of this shit hole" or "what are we even here for?". In fact, they may even like what they do for a living. Bigelow is using the Iraq war to tell a specific story, one that despite its setting, is not a political one. The same is true for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, which is not a movie about World War 2, but a movie about World War 2 movies. Both films have different agendas, more pop than political, and apparently many believe modern war movies should only strive to say that war is bad.
The fact that Iraq is the backdrop for Jeremy Renner's character to ply his insanely dangerous trade, is not all that important. He would be functioning exactly the same if he were in any other conflict, in any other part of the world. For him, staring down the makeshift engineering of an explosive device tunes out politics, emotions, and duties to family and country. The disarming of a killing device becomes a contest to see if he can not get killed. And he is addicted to playing the game. Facing down these bombs is an intellectual test, as well as a test of endurance--how long and hard can his adrenaline pump to keep him one step ahead of the bombs timer?
The ingenious aspect of The Hurt Locker is its episodic quality, structured around the disarming of each bomb. Each mission and its bomb is like it's own self-contained short film. Sometimes these shorts are almost silent, devoid of dialogue. Bigelow and her cinematographer shoot the hell out of these sequences, and use sound in effective ways, ratcheting up the tension.
The problem with the critical hype and awards season speculation surrounding The Hurt Locker is that it may lead people to think that it an "important" movie, or a "message" movie, or that it will sort out your messy feelings about the Iraq conflict for you. It isn't and it won't. It's an action movie, expertly staged and executed and sometimes that's enough.
I was also surprised at how much of an action movie this turned out to be. The film implied that there was more going on underneath the surface of Renner's cowboy attitude but we never really get any exposition about it. Loved the film but not what I expected at all!
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