Review: The Hurt Locker

There’s a shot towards the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker when returning Staff Sergeant Will James goes to the supermarket after a year’s tour in Iraq. He becomes daunted, almost intimidated, by the simple everyday task of selecting a breakfast cereal. Endless rows of commercial packaging swallow James rendering him as a bland entity against the artificial backdrop of ‘real life’. This one image captures the essence not only of Sergeant Will James but the film entire: to seize life or be seized by it.

The Hurt Locker follows an elite bomb unit as they clear the streets of Baghdad of IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices), something that is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the army – something we find out all too soon.

Following the death of unit leader Staff Sergeant Thompson the group lands itself another explosives expert in the shape of William James. James quickly loses the trust of the others in his unit by almost turning a routine seek and diffuse mission into a suicide plan. We know that what James is doing is wrong – as we do with most of his actions – but it’s exhilarating to watch such undeniable instinct and talent combined with an apparent disregard for life. His childish behaviour is hardly surprising given the relationship he quickly builds with DVD salesboy ‘Beckham’.

The unit comprises of three relatively stereotypical characters: there’s James - the renegade Cowboy, Sandborn – the all-American by the book Good boy and then there’s Eldridge the Lost boy. As the group manoeuvre from war-torn street to the next the film is devoid of any lengthy getting to know you small-talk. This instead comes in the others’ reaction to James’ borderline showboat methods. Although never outright trusting James both Sandborn and Eldridge begin to look to James for guidance, particularly Eldridge who at times looks as though he needs an arm around the shoulder, not a rifle in his hands.

The fact that Bigelow decided against casting marquee names as the three main leads adds to the vitality of the film. As an audience we become attached to this band of brothers and part of that is because we don’t have a, say, Tom Cruise to detach ourselves from. What we see is, quite rightly, what we get.

The film looks and sounds as intense as it feels. The screen sweats from the heat of the bright yellows and whites and the aggressive editing perfectly matches the unfolding chaos. Look at the way that when the unit move towards a suspected bomb Bigelow flash cuts to locals peering out of their windows. All of a sudden it’s as though the soldiers are being examined by hundreds of dark eyes.

All in all Bigelow has created something very unique with The Hurt Locker. It’s a very twenty first century war movie when violence is often invisible (coming from mobile phones and video cameras) but when it inevitably arrives it’s as much of a shock to us as it is the troops. This film is for the Staff Sergeant William James in all of us.

Rather than highlight the banality of war like Jarhead or glamorise it like The Green Berets, Bigelow shows us how war is, as is quoted at the very beginning, like a drug: for some it’s prescribed and others addictive.