The Hurt Locker – Review
Ever since the picture learned to move we remember our wars best in movies. May it be “All quiet on the western front”, “Paths of glory” or “Saving private ryan”. Just to name a few. All of them intense. All of them show the brutality of war. All of them show what war can do with an ordinary person. How it takes your life and makes it something you aren’t even able to explain to other people sometimes. People who haven’t experienced war.
Now this movie falls right into that line of movies. It’s a very smart movie too. In this movie we follow three soldiers stationed in Iraq. They are a special bomb squad and called in whenever there is something suspicious found anywhere in Baghdad. Kathryn Bigelow amazingly accomplishes it to create a suspense in these scenes when they are working on the bombs. The camera work is just great. It’s always an open movie. By that i mean that i never knew what will happen. Will the bomb go off. Will they make it. Will one of these guys be dead by the end of the movie. The plot was nicely unpredictable and i loved that. While we follow our main guys through their last 30 days of duty we can also get a glimpse at how it must be to live there. How dangerous it all is. How thin that ‘peace’ there actually is. It’s a world very hard to understand for our main characters. And not just for them. I couldn’t imagine to live there too. Always living in fear. On the other hand i guess to learn to process all the bad and sad circumstances there.
Jeremy Renner is our main character in this movie. I always liked him. I even had sympathies for his evil character in SWAT. I really loved the part he plays in this movie. You can understand the problems he’s having living in this war environment world but still having his head at home. Where he’s having tons of problems too. It’s almost like he’s fleeing into war. To not have to deal with all these nonsense normal life things. The other characters are played nicely too. Especially Brian Geraghty, who also did a remarkably job in “Jarhead” (very underrated movie from my POV), is doing nice work here too. It’s a similar role but nonetheless. I like to see him on the screen. We also have guest performances from people like Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes or David Morse. I love all these guys.
From a technical standpoint i would say that this movie is a perfect movie. It’s a very dry movie. And by that i don’t mean story wise or suspense wise. I mean that it’s a movie placed in a desert environment. And the movie is able to bring over that feel. The hotness. Dust everywhere. There is also almost no music in that movie. It must be one of the most quiet war movies i have ever seen. Because of that the sound fx really kick into gear and work so great. The explosions and the environment. It just works.
Check out his amazing piece of work. I highly recommend it. It’s my pick for the best film oscar this year.
8.5/10 from me today.
