The Hurt Locker

Guy Pierce in The Hurt Locker

Three years late I finally caught up with Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning movie, The Hurt Locker.  It's a good film but I wouldn't call it great (as some did).  There are moments of tension, of course, and it's highly dramatic in places (once or twice slipping into melodrama even ... the implausible expedition into the night after the tanker bomb, the drunken fight in the barracks) but (once Guy Pierce was finished) there was never really any risk that any of the principals would not make it out alive.  The final scenes were no surprise at all.

But it is a good movie.  The performances are excellent.  There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours of your life. 

I read something of John Pilger's criticism that the movie reduced the circumstances and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths during the American occupation of Iraq to an almost unseen backcloth.  He compared THL to The Deer Hunter in that respect.  I think, yes John and no.  It's broadly correct that there's an almost total lack of political context set in the movie but it's not wholly devoid of critique.  The American forces are clearly identified as an unwelcome, occupying force - even the way bystanders simply observe the troops' predicaments indicates that their presence is neither heroic nor justified.  There is too, I think, an attempt (not entirely successful) consider the alienating effects of the war on those who fight it.  Pilger's criticism depends (in part) on viewing The Hurt Locker as a film about the war in Iraq.  I'm not sure that's quite right.  It's more a film about the effect of war on men sent to fight that's set in Iraq.  That said, I'm not sure I buy entirely the conceit established with the aphorism that opens the film.