Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film is a departure. With Near Dark (1987), Bigelow traced the bloody path of cowboy vampires wreaking havoc on the desert road. In Point Break (1991), she combined extreme sports, bank heists and Keanu Reeves, and somehow, it was good. Finally, with her turn-of-the-millennium, sci-fi, crime-drama, the underrated Strange Days (1995), Bigelow prefigured the chaos of Y2K paranoia.
In The Hurt Locker, Bigelow steers clear of the fantastic, keeping her vision firmly entrenched in the far more harrowing realm of reality, namely, the second Iraq war. After losing the leader of their IED unit (Improvised Explosive Device), Sgt. Sanborn (Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Geraghty) must finish out the rest of their duty under Staff Sgt. William James (Renner), whose devil may care nonchalance and overeagerness to suit up and shake hands with the bomb are effective and careless. At times, James not only infuriates but energizes his squad members with his love for the rush of battle. As one colonel succinctly puts it, James is a “wild man.”
The plot plays out like a lit fuse, counting down the days until the company’s rotation, following the three members of the IED squad through a series of increasingly intense and violent vignettes, be they deactivation missions, random run-ins with insurgents or drunken in-fighting at the barracks. The three contrasting personalities manifest through their actions and reactions to this daily dance with death, each squad member illustrating different ways war wears on the human psyche. The shaky digital hand-held captures every nail-biting moment without glorifying or passing judgement.
Though adrenaline junkie Sgt. James is in the forefront, excellently portrayed with morose moxie by Renner, it is the contrast of Mackie’s and Geraghty’s naturalistic performances that add an extra level of depth and ambiguity to the film.
In addition to superior directing and acting, writer Mark Boal’s script lends the film much credibility, infusing military lexicon with colloquial curses common to high intensity situations.
Like all good war movies, The Hurt Locker taps into the intensity of a specific war while also exploring universal themes of human conflict. Bigelow’s film shows what happens when you forget how to worry and love only the bomb.
