The Hurt Locker: Thoughts

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now but haven't got round to it, so now here it is:

The Hurt Locker is a modern war film set in Iraq and focusing on a bomb disposal team, the film gained most of its fame by beating 'Avatar' to win the Oscar Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2010.

After going into this film not knowing what to expect (I hadn't read any synopses about the film or heard any spoilers) I was pleasantly surprised by the film's characters and storyline. Rather than focusing on one of the most commonly used war film plots (the rescue mission) and having flat one dimensional marines the plot just seemed to focus on the various events that happened during the squad's tour of duty, with a time limit occasionally appearing on the screen displaying how many days they had left, this made you want the soldiers to get out alive but also made you weary that just before they were due to leave someone would die, thankfully they didn't resort to that tired cliché (completely).

The soldier's themselves had a lot more depth than is commonly seen in war movies and a lot of the movie is spent with the soldiers as they exchange banter and discuss what life's like back home. At a time where soldiers are still being killed in Afghanistan it makes you realise that all the faces you see on the news that might seem like statistics at the time are all real people with friends and family who will miss them. The soldiers are frequently seen talking about their families and one soldier says he wanted to have kids at some point but now thinks it's too late. This somewhat defies the old notion that the army is the last resort for people with nothing and nowhere else to go. Even the main character, who is depicted as slightly different from everyone else (he defuses bombs with sometimes absurd methods, including taking off his bomb suit or acting entirely on instinct) is shown as a very human character, he has a wife and even a child back home.

As I have little knowledge of the American military or the conditions of the war in Iraq the film felt real enough for the audience to believe what is going on and the human cost of the war is very well sometimes graphically depicted; children who the soldiers have interacted with are shown dead on several occasions, the bomb squad aren't always successful in what they do, several times they fail to disarm bombs and people do die as a result. In one particular scene the soldiers arrive in the aftermath of an explosion and one of them just surveys the scene for a moment in disbelief, he was there a few minutes previously and everything seemed normal, now it is anything but. Perhaps this also illustrates that no matter how many times they see this it doesn't get any easier to cope with. Other times they would be caught in the crossfire and not always hit their targets with one shot (like a lot of action movies) and basic things like a fly can break their concentration.

The explosions, what few of them were in the film were also handled with a degree of realism, the explosions are shown as very powerful and not the fireballs a hero can just walk away from as seen in a lot of Hollywood films, at the beginning a soldier is killed by being thrown away from the explosion and breaking his head open on the bomb suit that was supposed to protect him. When an explosion goes off the ground erupts around the bomb, making it literally earth shattering.

I could go on about how good this film is but when all said and done it's a refreshing, reasonably realistic and interesting war film that's definitely worth watching.