SPOTLIGHT
The Sunday Age
Sunday February 21, 2010
THE HURT LOCKER(MA15+, 131 minutes). On general releaseAlthough The Hurt Locker is set in Baghdad in 2004, it's less about the current war in Iraq than it is about war in general and, specifically, its impact on those who fight it. It doesn't turn a blind eye to the consequences of the US invasion for civilians who find their streets turned into battlefields, but it's not angry like Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) or Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (2007), both of which dealt with atrocities committed by US troops. Rather, in its measured but agonisingly suspenseful way, and along the same lines as films as various as Anthony Mann's Men in War (1957), set in Korea, and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), in Vietnam, it's fascinated by how soldiers act inside "the kill zone".The main characters are members of a US bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad in 2004. As it counts down the days left in their tour of duty less than six weeks to go the film charts a series of incidents in which the three-man team works together to locate and dismantle explosives in civilian areas. What they call "the kill zone" is the immediate area around the bombs where damage is likely to occur, but the film makes it clear that everywhere they go is a kill zone.Surrounded by unfamiliar faces and unable to distinguish friend from foe, they're constantly on the alert. They might be heavily armed, but that means nothing if they misread the signs. Is the man with the mobile phone down the street an innocent bystander or is he about to set off the bomb that's been planted in the nearby debris?Danger is all around. There is no safe place, no refuge from the nightmare. And not just for them. The sign on their Humvee spells out in large red capitals that they're not prepared to trust anybody: "Caution Stay 100 Meters Back Or You Will Be Shot."Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Point Break, K-19: The Widowmaker), The Hurt Locker is based on a screenplay by American journalist Mark Boal. An earlier article he'd written for Playboy about the effect of the Iraq war on its combatants was the inspiration for Paul Haggis' screenplay for In the Valley of Elah (2007). Here he draws on what he learned during his time embedded with a bomb squad in Baghdad in 2004. And, in her perfectly judged deployment of the hand-held documentary style, Bigelow makes it seem as if her camera is embedded within the unit.A few of the cast's faces are familiar: Guy Pearce plays the team leader; David Morse is a visiting colonel; Ralph Fiennes turns up as a British bounty hunter. Most of them are not. Jeremy Renner is superb as the seemingly fearless Staff Sergeant William James, a hands-on disposals expert who is most alive when he's dismantling bombs and whose bravado is as awe-inspiring as it is frightening. Anthony Mackie plays the experienced African-American sergeant who doesn't know whether to loathe James or love him. Brian Geraghty is the private who just wants to do what he's supposed to do and go home, interested only in being a follower and a survivor.But Bigelow doesn't play favourites. Star billing means nothing here. Everyone is vulnerable. To the bombs, to the snipers' bullets, to the heat and the dust and the unfamiliar surroundings, to the enemy that knows how to test their patience, to the resentments that divide them. The Hurt Locker, which, according to Boal, borrows its title from a slang saying for "a painful place", takes us inside these soldiers' circumstances without engaging in any of neatly packaged psychological profiling that mars other films of its ilk.But it also manages a remarkable balancing act and it's largely this, along with the economic brilliance of its execution, that makes it one of the best war movies of recent times. At the same time as it maintains a sympathy for all of its characters aside, perhaps, from the British contractors it also insists that under no circumstances should we be trusting their judgment, moral or otherwise. Tom Ryan
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