Until now, there hasn’t been a great film about the ongoing war in Iraq. The contenders have either been too mawkish (Grace is Gone), too depressing (In the Valley of Elah), or too polemical (Stop-Loss).
But Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is more than just the first great film about Gulf II. It deserves to be ranked among the best war films of all time.
What really sets the film apart is how Bigelow shows the agonizing paradox of war—how you vacillate between numbing boredom and the electric-shock terror of fighting for your life—and her film is about falling in love with the adrenalin rush (“war is a drug” reads a quote as the film begins). It’s about how there’s a certain almost comforting clarity to life in combat—it’s all instinct and reaction, life or death. When you’re fighting for your life, everything else recedes into the background. (In an amazing coda to the film, Bigelow shows one of the main characters back home in the States, contemplating a giant row of cereal at the supermarket. The array of options—not to mention the absurd banality of it all—speaks volumes.)
The Hurt Locker focuses on Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), whose sole role in Iraq is to investigate and often defuse those improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. It’s the old firefighters line: When everyone else is running out, that’s when James is running in.
When we first meet James, he is taking over command of the Bravo Unit, whose previous team leader has just been killed by a remotely detonated bomb. Guided by the watchful eye of Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), the Bravo Unit is precise and cautious, befitting a group that is making such dangerous life-and-death decisions.
But that’s not the way James operates. He’s a cowboy—a lone wolf, who goes in, does what needs to be done, and can’t bother with protocol. Renner is positively electrifying in this part. His James is more than just an adrenalin junkie—he proves himself to be truly brave and a genuinely good man. But his macho bravado is also somewhat scary. If there’s a narrow space between hero and sociopath, James embodies it.
The third member of the troop, Specialist Owen Eldridgem (Brian Geraghty), is a dutiful soldier, but almost overwhelmed by his own fragility in the midst of this unpredictable combat. While Eldridgem regards James with an equal measure of awe and disdain, Sanborn hates James—at least at first. He feels that James’ recklessness endangers lives. Eventually, the two men come to form a grudging mutual respect. There is a telling scene where they get drunk and start play-fighting. The tussle, inevitably, turns violent, but never completely crosses over into something ugly. It’s almost as if these two men know they need to get this aggression out and put it away. In battle, they need to be brothers.
The Hurt Locker is exhilarating, terrifying, and profound. It is redolent of heat and sand, the same way Apocalypse Now was redolent of the jungle. It shows how, in Iraq, a civilian talking on a cell phone can be completely innocuous or an ominous threat—but how to tell the difference? Bigelow puts you in the midst of that morass.
In such films as Point Break and Near Dark, Bigelow already proved she has serious action chops. But nothing prepared me for this blend of insight and excruciatingly tense and vivid action. She’s stepped into a whole new league.