The Hurt Locker

Heard some great reviews of this film and so decided to avoid Inglorious Basterds in favour of this when I went to the cinema last weekend. I get the cinema quite rarely these days, so it was quite a big decision for me. I think I'll be going to the cinema more often now that I've worked out I can cycle to the local Showcase from my new house.

Anyway, 'The Hurt Locker', a film about the Iraq war - or is it? Well it's a film about a bomb disposal team operating in Iraq, although the fact that it's in Iraq is fairly irrelevant. There's not a huge amount about the whys and wherefors of the US army's invasion of that country, what they're doing there or how the people react to them. There is a huge amount about peoples' reactions to war, the pressure, the exhaustion and the desire to escape in one piece.

The story is about a unit in Iraq who have the unenviable task (is any task in Iraq actually enviable?) of disarming booby-trapped bombs - Improvised Explosive Devices. The engineer in charge of the unit is killed in the opening scene and a new guy is sent to replace him, the new guy is a bit of a fruit loop who gets an adrenaline high off of taking risks and disarming bombs using traditional methods. The film revolves around the tension between this character and the people who have to live and work with him.

The first thing that impressed me was how the film kept its own tension going. The first time they diffuse a bomb it is tense, when the new guy arrives and does the same it is tenser still. By the third diffusing scene I was starting to wonder when it was going to get boring and repetitive - it never did. The next thing that struck me was the use of fairly famous actors in minor roles. Guy Peirce plays the bomb disposal guy who gets killed at the start, Ralph Fiennes is a British soldier who cops it and Evangeline Lilly plays the wife of the main character, she appears right at the end for only 2 scenes and barely gets any lines. I guess all these characters are supposed to be some kind of statement about loss in war, be it because of death (a la 'The Thin Red Line' but miles better), or by emotionally losing contact with those who have not experienced conflict.

I'm struggling to think of anything bad to say about this film at all. The usual habit war films have of treating 'the other side' as faceless goons doesn't really happen. Even the slightly gung-ho ending (which plays out to a rocking metal soundtrack) doesn't make the film feel any less about war being bad, more that the lead character thrives of the adrenaline war gives him - even if that adrenaline leads to deaths and woundings of others around him.

Overall I'm going to have to give this a big stamp of approval. Shame about missing Inglorious Basterds - saw 'District 9' yesterday (review soon) so I guess Tarantino is going to have to wait for the DVD.