The fact is, "The Hurt Locker" deserves all of the buzz, the praise and the nominations for awards that it's getting. I know I had already posted my list of favorite movies in 2009, that I saw, and I really wish I managed to catch it in the theaters. Then again, there's no such rule as "not being able to make a late-addition to your end-of-the-year favorites list," so that being said, "The Hurt Locker" is one of my favorite movies of 2009 and I will be rooting for it to win the top two prizes (Best Picture and Best Director) at the Oscars.
The movie follows an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. It's not a team of super-soldiers that can clear out a room with deadly accuracy. These are just your average soldiers that get called in to defuse a bomb under the most tense of situations, which I wouldn't even want to picture putting myself into. I mean, how can difussing a bomb be more tense than being engaged in close-quarters urban combat where any turn around a corner, you could be met with a bullet into your head. But, that is the work environment this EOD team and all EOD teams in real life go to. It's this tension that is done so well in "The Hurt Locker." Even though the EOD team has been trained in this, I still found myself sitting on the edge of my seat thinking that one wire that shouldn't have been cut would trigger the bomb. Yes I know it's a movie, but it's a movie about the grim reality that our servicemen and women face everyday over there. I attribute this ability to create the tension, not just for the sake of creating it because it's a movie about a serious subject, but creating the tension because without it, it would have not been authentic, to the movie's writer Mark Boal and the director Kathryn Bigelow. The calm panic that the lone technician going towards the bomb and their support soldiers, a great length of distance away from the technician and the bomb is uncomfortable, but you accept it.
The tension when they're out on the field and the stark contrast of when they are back in the barracks and done for the day, trying to find some sort of normalcy and repeating it over again is done by a cast that really you probably have never heard of. Names that might be a bit more familiar to you, Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes make cameos in the movie, but it's the cast of Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty as the EOD team that I believe for all three individuals are breakout roles. Especially Renner, who was most recently seen in the ABC sitcom that never got a chance, but oh brother should it have, "The Unusuals." Renner is the man that goes in to diffuse these bombs and he does with such reckless abandon that on one hand you think is just cool and badass, but it goes back to the uncomfortable feeling that you experience because let's face it...the man's job in Iraq is tinkering with devices that blow people and buildings to bits. There's no better display for Renner's character's reckless attitude than in one scene where he removes his protective bombsuit and says, "There's enough bang in there to blow us all to Jesus. If I'm gonna die, I want to die comfortable."
While Renner is the breakout in front of the camera (as much as the breakout comes with him defusing bombs, there is a scene in the movie where he delivers one of the most powerful lines I've ever heard in a movie), it's the director Kathryn Bigelow that is experiencing a breakout herself. All of the praise that she is getting is well deserved. She's making a lot of noise as possibly the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar award. Her efforts in "The Hurt Locker" have created a very raw and immersive picture of the horrors being in Iraq; about three-quarters of the way into the movie, the EOD team is going through a building where they find, well to take what was said in the movie, a lot of "fucking disgusting" things. However this is the daily life over there, in a combat zone and Bigelow makes no attempts to make it look sanitized.
I tell people that I've seen "The Hurt Locker" and they ask, "I want to see that. Is it good?" I tell them yes. It is worth the buzz that it's been getting, because it is. "The Hurt Locker" is a very vivid, real, tense and uncomfortable picture about the Iraq War and modern warfare in general in all the ways that "Saving Private Ryan" was for World War 2. While some movies are shatting oft-debated all-time box office grossing lists, albeit with some very impressive visuals, it's raw, back to reality whether you like it or not movies like "The Hurt Locker" that just stick with you.
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