the news of today will be the movies of tomorrow

The Hurt Locker is an action movie.  It’s directed by Kathryn Bigalow, so this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen Point Break, i.e. all white males between the ages of 15-55 as well as most of everyone else.  And although it simply oozes adrenaline that’s about where the comparison ends.  The Oscar noms are completely warranted.  Bigalow has managed to provide the first attempt by any member of the Hollywood establishment to deal with the ongoing ignominy of the Iraq war with anything remotely resembling a sober mind.

The only overt clue towards the film’s political sympathies (if it has any – the filmmakers have quite carefully left the question open) is provided by the opening quote from the left-wing political commentator Chris Hedges that ‘war is a drug’.  Or to be a touch more precise, the adrenaline that it induces is.  From the masterfully directed opening sequence (which sees the rapid demise of Guy Pearce along with any hope of any stars riding in to save the day) onwards, Bigalow forces the audience to share the at times excruciating levels of tension that her characters endure.

Not that they may exactly be called characters in any proper sense.  Replacing the unfortunate Pearce as leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit within Bravo Company of the United States army is Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner), a confident battle-tested customer with the job of defusing Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs, or more commonly, road-side bombs), a task he performs with unrestrained relish.  Less confidant are underlings Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who provide him with cover whilst vainly attempting to reign in James’ reckless tendencies.

The film depicts the following month in the soldier’s lives – action flows with alarming regularity, any conventional sense of plot being sacrificed in a skilful attempt to capture the hyper-reality of modern warfare.  Kidnappings, roadside bombs, snipers, car-bombs and body-bombs (explosives sewn inside corpses) are presented with an almost documentary sense of realism, accompanied by dialogue that is remarkable for its unforced and unselfconscious fly on the wall character.

The enemy is diffuse.  Predominantly set in the urban settings in which the war has been fought, the civilian population are portrayed as constant, impassive spectators, any of whose watchful faces might conceal the individual wielding the detonator.  The language barrier breeds confusion, violence multiplies.  At one point James pulls a single cord, unwittingly unearthing half a dozen bombs cunningly strung together around him, as excellent a metaphor as any for the interconnected hostilities that have continually re-emerged to engulf the country’s ‘liberators’.

As with David Simon’s somewhat overlooked mini-series Generation Kill, Bigalow is more concerned with the trauma inflicted on the aggressors than the occupied nation.  Empty periods between active duty are filled with video games or vaguely homo-erotic post-battle bonding all of which prove hopelessly inadequate to providing the three principal characters much in the way of respite from or perspective on the horrific immediacy of Iraqi everyday reality.  Wryly fatalistic humour is the norm, platitudes such as ‘going to war can be a once in a lifetime experience’ mouthed by a Yale-graduate army psychologist sounding as devoid of meaning to the troubled Eldridge as to everyone else.

Mark Boal, a war journalist embedded with a bomb defusing squad in the early years of the Iraq war, has produced an extraordinarily disciplined script, brimming with telling detail.  The acting is generally excellent, Bigalow’s use of no-name actors assisting immeasurably in forcing the audience to accept the film’s reality – those few celebrities given roles enjoy only brief cameos and are quickly reduced to bit parts (ahem).

And despite the obvious assertion made at the opening, The Hurt Locker is in some ways an anti-action film – it demonstrates the awful consequences of James’ addiction to the rush by forcing the audience to share in and become complicit in it.  Bigalow has produced a masterful film that does not indulge in any heavy-handed sermonising, rather allowing the anarchic flow of atrocity speak for itself.  Go see it.  Now.