On Saturday, my brother proposed renting an Oscar movie so that we could
get in a little last-minute cramming. “Works for me,” I said. “As long
as it’s not something depressing like The Hurt Locker.” He then proceeded to tell me that The Hurt Locker was precisely what he had in mind, and as he’s home on spring break, I didn’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud.
Ryan Kelly, my favorite member of Celtic Thunder, had endorsed it as “certainly up there with Saving Private Ryan and Platoon as my favorite war movies.” Well, I hated Saving Private Ryan,
except for Tom Hanks and Jeremy Davies, whose characters’ arcs ended in
a most distressing fashion, and I couldn’t get through Platoon. “Hurt Locker
will probably not be everyone’s cup of tea,” Ryan conceded when he
tweeted his praise of the film. I was sure it wouldn’t be mine.
I can’t say it’s a movie I have any desire to watch again. But was it
done well? Was there edge-of-the-seat action? Did Kathryn Bigelow
deserve to become the first woman to win Best Director? Yes. Yes. And
probably yes. She certainly gave me the sense that we were right there
in Iraq with the specialists risking their lives at every turn to
diffuse bombs. The movie almost felt more like a documentary than a
traditional film. And while I was still stubbornly rooting for UP for Best Picture and probably enjoyed The Hurt Locker the least out of the Best Picture contenders I saw, I don’t begrudge the movie the win there either.
The Hurt Locker
stars Jeremy Renner as SSG William James, who comes across as a
slightly mad adrenaline junkie who is nonetheless very good at his job.
He’s paired up with Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who’s been in
Iraq longer and fears his new partner is a bit of a loose cannon.
Naturally, over the course of the movie, the very different men come to
respect one another as they cheat death together.
While I was
unfamiliar with Renner and have only seen Mackie in a couple of movies,
and didn’t recognize him off the bat, there are several big names in
this film, but they only pop in for a few moments. In the beginning, we
have Guy Pearce as the man Will comes in to replace. David Morse and
Robert Duvall put in similarly brief appearances, and Evangeline Lilly
has a few short scenes as Will‘s ex-wife Connie. Her presence in the
film prompted many LOSTies to make the Hurt Locker / Avatar showdown not just a rivalry between Bigelow and James Cameron but also between Kate Austen and AnaLucia Cortez.
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, filming in Jordan and Kuwait, creates
the ultimate tourist repellant for Iraq. The desolation is palpable,
with everything shrouded in dust and concealed weapons on every corner.
For a war movie, I found it surprisingly quiet, as the film simply
follows these men in their everyday lives, which just happen to
sometimes include pulse-pounding danger. There’s not a lot of one side
fighting another as such; in this movie, the Americans we see are almost
entirely about the preservation of life. Those who plant the bombs are
usually out of the picture, having left their special deliveries in the
ground or strapped to some hapless victim.
This film serves as a powerful reminder that not all suicide bombers have a choice in the matter. The Hurt Locker
gives us two heartbreaking examples of this, in the form of Beckham
(Christopher Sayegh), a plucky local boy William befriends, and a father
who appeals to the bomb squad for help after getting rigged up with a
thoroughly alarming contraption. The latter is perhaps the most intense
scene of the movie, and it reminds me eerily of my hometown’s most
morbid claim to fame, being the site of the 2003 Pizza Bomber Incident. I
was just a couple of blocks away when the drama unfolded on upper Peach
Street as pizza deliveryman Brian Wells, having just held up a bank
under orders from a crazed conspirator, was cornered by police and,
revealing that he was locked into a bomb, proceeded to beg for his life.
Watching the film, I couldn’t help thinking that if Erie’s bomb squad
had been summoned as quickly and responded as passionately as William
and J. T., the outcome could have been much different. Chilling.
The Hurt Locker
is a downer of a movie. It’s gritty and profane and violent. But it’s
also extremely compelling, and even inspiring to think of the risks
these soldiers embrace as they seek to diffuse as many bombs as they can
in their tours of duty. Even for those like William who thrive on the
thrill this omnipresent danger delivers, there’s a lot to be said for
that kind of bravery and willingness to sacrifice one‘s life in an
effort to make the world safer.
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