While its behind-the-scenes machinations are mined for laughs in another superlative film this summer, In the Loop, war is also very much at the heart of The Hurt Locker, a punishing, devastatingly well-made Iraq-set thriller with an implosive but no less powerful emotional impact. Eschewing the whirling, bird’s-eye helicopter shots of so many armed conflict flicks (this is most assuredly not a Tony Scott film), director Kathryn Bigelow tightens her focus in laser-like fashion, examining the effects of combat and danger on the human psyche.
Unfolding in Iraq in the summer of 2004, the movie opens on Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), part of a small, elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad specifically trained to handle the homemade bombs killing thousands of Iraqis and accounting for more than half of all American deaths in the country. A high-pressure assignment, the job leaves no room for mistakes, as they learn when they lose their team leader on a mission. When cocksure Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) takes over the unit, Sanborn and Eldridge are unnerved by what seems like his reckless disregard for both military protocol and basic safety measures. As chaos swirls around them, Sanborn and Eldridge try to come to terms with James’ behavior, even as it seems to endanger them during the dog days of their respective tours.
Based on the first-hand observations of journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special Army bomb unit in
The wry, mordant banter of the soldiers is often revealing. “Aren’t you glad the Army has all those tanks parked there so if the Russians come along we can have a big tank battle?” one specialist asks his cohort. Yet Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd — who similarly located the solemnity of courage and doom in United 93 — also find compelling shorthand images with which to seed their film, as with a hobbled cat limping along the dusty, war-torn roadside.
Through it all, there are set piece moments of exquisitely fine-tuned pressure-cooker tension, executed by Bigelow with a steely precision and skill that matches her protagonist’s on-screen bomb-defusing talents. One sequence finds James having to examine the body of a young boy that may have been booby-trapped; another scene finds him locating and disarming a hidden improvised explosive device, only to pull up a spider web of buried red ancillary wires, stretching 12 to 15 feet in every direction.
The Hurt Locker is perhaps most notable, though, for the manner in which much of its emotional impact lies outside the parameters of the picture and its contained, if ample, drama. Without giving away anything, suffice it to say that the film plays as a sort of tragic prequel to a post-traumatic stress disorder drama one might see five or six years hence. The greatest tragedy of war, you see, is that it isn’t really over when it ends. (