Film about American bomb technicians in Iraq excellent disquieting
Francois Truffaut once remarked that it’s impossible to make an antiwar film because whatever the filmmaker’s intent there will always be a primal thrill in seeing violence on the screen. The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the lives of the U.S. Army’s bomb technicians may just have proved the father of the French New Wave wrong. Even the moments of excitement in the film are belied by a sense of tension so perfectly crafted and so God damn macabre that getting through the entire 130 minutes without a break is a test of mental fortitude.
The heroes’ enemies are ghosts having already come and gone leaving the cities and deserts jury-rigged to explode at the slightest misstep. The landscape itself is the closest thing in The Hurt Locker to a proper antagonist so it’s no wonder that hazy claustrophobic imagery of labyrinthine city streets and alleyways features so prominently — it’s a maze as deadly and unwelcoming as Theseus’s even if there’s no minotaur waiting at its heart.
Strictly speaking though The Hurt Locker isn’t an antiwar film. Occasionally someone will spout some Obama-approved rhetoric about “creating insurgents” just so there’s no confusion as to where Bigelow stands but the film never dwells for long on the further-reaching political implications of the American presence in Iraq. If anything the film is a character piece. Jeremy Renner gives a career-defining performance as Staff Sgt. William James an ace bomb tech who seems a little too willing to put his life on the line to protect his men and the people of Iraq. James is the sort of guy who keeps a box of “interesting” bomb-detonation triggers under his bed and who sticks a pistol in the face of a man who just charged at him with a car asking with dreadful calm if he wouldn’t mind backing up please. He’s a man who’s frustrated by the banality of civilian life who can only make sense of the world when he’s about to be vapourized by a car bomb. To say he has a death wish is an unfair reduction of the character. If war is a drug — as the film’s opening quotation would have you believe — then James is an addict.
