The Hurt Locker

Few war movies are able to portray combat on a truly personal level that separates the whole of the war from the stories of the men who fight. Most movies about combat are so focused on soldierS that the plight of the individual is rarely addressed, and if so it is at best secondary to the main narrative (or made into an overblown caricature, such is in the fairly awful Jarhead). Of course, this only makes sense when you consider that this is the very nature of the army, to strip all individuality away from the soldier and emphasize the whole of the unit; thus, it would take a truly remarkable film by a skillful director in order to break this paradigm so that we may peer into the soul of one enlisted man, and as you may have inferred, veteran filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is such a film.

Bigelow achieves this so successfully because in place of a story-driven narrative, the plot of the film is concerned with the essence of an idividual. That man is hot-shot Sgt. William James, played with powerful ambiguity by Jeremy Lenner, who becomes the leader of Bravo company's EOD unit, who's job it is to find and disarm road side bombs. As his tour of duty winds down, Sgt. James becomes more and more reckless in his job, seemingly seeking to fulfill a death wish.

Never before has a film about war portrayed combat as such an interpersonal struggle. When we think of war, it's usually as a battle between two opposing armies, but we rarely conceive that these battles are fought by and won 3 or 4 dead soldiers at a time. This is war on an extremely individualist level; there are no presidents, no grand plans, just instinctual improvisation when the shit inevitably hits the fan. The Hurt Locker is essentially a series of scenes oozing with extreme tension; our protagonists' lives could end at any second, be it from a sniper, bomb, or even a fellow soldier. From the first scene, we are brought into a world in which we are never allowed to feel safe for even a minute, and for some, they may never be able to leave. B

Other semi-related thoughts:

-The aesthetic of our current quagmire is pretty unappealing to me, full of vast expanses of desert and gray, colorless cities. Makes you yearn for the days of wars fought in jungles.

-I would be so incredibly inept as a soldier.

-Its interesting how our sympathy for these characters works in comparison to films about vietnam where the soldier is often seen as a victim of the draft where as there is a tendency to think of our current enlisted men as wanting to kill.

-Having an entire theater all to yourself is pretty fuckin great.