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Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
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The Hurt
Locker “The
Hurt Locker” is a scary and frightening view into the work of a team of
three American soldiers in Iraq whose job is to defuse roadside bombs and
IUDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that have been placed and hidden by what
we call ‘the enemy.’ though I’m not quite sure what that
means. The
three are Jeremy Renner as Staff Sgt. William James; Anthony Mackie as Sgt.
J.T. Sanborn, and Brian Geraghty as Specialist Owen
Eldrige.
The movie wastes no time with expositions of their backstories
or their personalities or their lives outside their work. It begins with the defusing of an
I.E.D. along a road in Baghdad.
The one who does the work is Renner, wearing a suit and helmet
designed to absorb and deflect bomb fragments, yet leaving his hands free to
manipulate the wires and the trigger devices and the explosives, which also
means that if the bomb should explode while he’s working on it, he will
lose at least his two hands. He
knows this. Director
Kathryn Bigelow, working in a genre that up till now has been the exclusive
property of male directors, has.brought this
frightening yet essential work so close to us we can almost smell the dust,
the copper wires, the C-4 explosives.
The men are in radio contact throughout, while Renner is defusing the
bomb, watching the surrounding buildings for telltale signs of someone
triggering the bomb by remote, cell-phone control. Once in a while they may chase a
suspicious person through alleys and up apartment blocks. But
mainly their job is to de-activate the bombs; the more they do, statistically
the more likely it is that one of them will go off while Renner is working on
it. But there is an addiction to
danger here that we see in him and his partners, as the tension ratchets
up. Toward the end of the film an Iraqi, a middle-aged man, turns out to have a suicide
bomb strapped to his body; he now tells them he does not want to die –
perhaps he was forced to wear this because he opposed the bomb-makers. Whatever the reason, Renner must go
and try to defuse it all. It is a
moment in which we all hold our breath. The
number of days until they are rotated home is shown on the screen, until they
are finally at the last day. What
happens then is only for those who watch the movie. “The Hurt Locker” is an
extraordinary achievement and should be seen by anyone concerned with the
Iraq war and its consequences. |