The Hurt Locker

I first heard of The Hurt Locker on the Jimmy Fallon Show, strangely enough. I am not a avid watcher of this program, but the allure of the Roots got me to watch one night, and his guest happened to be Anthony Mackie, who plays Sergeant JT Sanborn. Mackie was also sporting Philavania's famous "Ill" shirt, reppin' Philly and easing his way into my heart as a fellow lover of Philly (and The Roots, who he was enamored by).

I heard while watching the show that it had been getting terrific reviews and tons of praise. When I saw the poster at the movie theater, the biggest review shouted out to me: "A NEAR PERFECT MOVIE." Really, how could I turn it down, especially when I hadn't heard nearly anything about it. Obviously no one could predict it would win Best Picture later that year, so I thought it was just an independent movie that had gotten to the AMC chain somehow.

After the first viewing at the AMC Neshaminy 24 theater in Bensalem, I was pretty pleased. My heart was racing, and I felt like it might have been the most intense movie I had seen in a long time. My brother and his friend were less impressed, calling it "forgettable." The movie left its mark on me, but I did have one complaint from the get go: the ending (DON'T WORRY NO SPOILERS).

Without saying anything about the ending shot or its significance to the film, I will talk about the choice of music. If you want to know two ways to take me completely out of a movie, know these: 1. Have an awful last shot (like the freeze frame at the end of Slumdog Millionaire), and 2. Fill your movie with butt rock (which might happen to the American remake of Let The Right One In, but more on that later). The Hurt Locker was devoid of non-diegetic butt rock for the whole movie until the very last shot, where a song blasts that sounds like a combination of Three Doors Down's "Citizen Soldier" with some middle-eastern women singing incredibly loud over the rumbling butt riffs. One of the only fails in this movie is this song at the end. At least, that's what I thought the first time.

Fast forward to after its won the statue. This must have been March, the last time I had seen it was the summer before. I downloaded it from my PS3 so that me and my roommate, who had also seen it before, could enjoy it in a more private, pot filled setting.

Veterans have often cited the movie as being good for a movie about the Iraq war, but not so good at getting everything accurate. Mark Boal penned the script after following a bomb squad around Iraq for some time, later fictionalizing events that could happen in the lives of these soldiers. It's certainly not a bad thing to do this, people do it all the time with war movies. It can't always be a history lesson, and director Kathryne Bigelow doesn't want it to be one. It's supposed to be an account of the most personal moments these soldiers go through on the battlefield, but after a second viewing I found it difficult to detach myself from the occasionally implausible scenes this movie has to offer.

The biggest one being the car scene. Actually both car scenes. In one scene, Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), the fiery doesn't-play-by-the-rules kind of soldier, removes his headset while trying to disarm a car bomb. In another, he has a showdown with a car that almost hits him on a deserted street where an IED could very well be hiding.

I've never been in the military, but I have read enough about the war and watched enough documentaries on Soldiers to know a few things. One thing is that in the car-bomb situation, the leader would NEVER EVER EVER remove their headset. Safety is always their first option, and that kind of pigheadedness is the kind of shit that can get you in a lot of trouble, people won't trust you, and they won't want to be under your command. Also, in a situation where the Americans have deserted a street because of the fear of an IED, and a car out of nowhere comes speeding towards you with intent to kill you as you walk the streets alone, well, that's just a one-way ticket to the morgue. I'm not saying that soldiers kill just anybody, absolutely not, but in this situation I find it very hard to believe that the soldier wouldn't fire a single shot at the oncoming vehicle, even after it stopped. If you get within a certain distance of some transport vehicles you can get shot at, and this situation is no different. It's war, this is no time to be a cooler version of Jack Bauer.

These scenes may not be realistic, but they do serve a purpose. You see, nothing much really happens in this movie. It's so suspenseful because you keep thinking, "This is the scene when they get blown up," or something along those lines. But for the most part they go day to day encountering situations that are dangerous but usually let them live to see another day (otherwise it'd be a short movie). These scenes need to be here to add tension, conflict, drama, and the first time I saw it I didn't notice it at all. I thought it was just mega-intense writing. But after a bit of an obsession in the fall with PBS war documentaries, they just seemed unrealistic. I wanted to enjoy them more, but I just couldn't shake it.

This is really the only thing I didn't like about it after my second viewing. The camera work is superb, taking so much advantage of the current obsession with uber-slow-motion shots (World Cup anyone???). The sound design works so well, and the editing makes your heart jump at the twitch of an eye. You never know what's going to come, as recent warfare often reminds us that death comes quickly and unexpectedly often with IEDs, roadside bombs, suicide bombs, etc...

One more thing resonated after the second viewing. One shot, this one shot that I loved so much the first time I saw it. No, it's not the big explosion in the beginning, or the one at the end, or anything in between. It's this shot:




It's a shot that captures so much in it's context within the narrative. A wall of food, a wall of food, and he has no idea what to get. It's the shot I was waiting for the whole movie. It sums up the entire veteran's conundrum. The return to normalcy after being somewhere that isn't normal at all to their standards. The feeling of emptiness even when you're surrounded by all of this surplus, and the bitterness that bites back. It might be the most accurate shot of the entire film.

All in all, the second viewing left me more disappointed than the first, but I still feel like it's a movie worth seeing at least once purely for the suspense. It'll be hard to one-up The Hurt Locker when it comes to suspense, but I eagerly await the next film that convinces me to stay in that theater so I can ride every scene out, only because I can't look away.

And hopefully in 25 years, Bigelow will sign off on a non-butt rock version of the film to be distributed internationally, freeing us from the shackles of mediocre rock music. A boy can dream, can't he?

By Brad Moore