The Hurt Locker was one of the best films I've seen in a long time. I loved Avatar, Up, District 9, and Up In The Air, as well as some of the other nominees for the 2010 Best Picture Academy Award, but The Hurt Locker won, and rightly so.
The film is beautifully crafted and tricks you into thinking the carnage beautiful with its slow motion captures of exploding roadside bombs and its shimmering deserts seen through the scope of a sniper rifle. The film opens with a quotation from a New York Times war correspondent who states that "War is a drug." By the end of the film we understand the allure and know why the protagonist walks off the plane with adrenaline in his veins and rock music in his ears. In this world he is a powerful man, one with the ability and the taste for looking death in the face and beating it. You can tell this film is expertly written and acted because the viewer can see inside the heads of each of the characters without a lot of exposition.
The soldiers and specialists in the film are good at what they do, but that by no means guarantees their safety. This film has long stretches of incredible tension. There aren't any cheap tricks like false alarms and jangly music to make you jump. It simply lays out the scene and lets you know how close everyone is to death at each second. In one scene the protagonist is frantically searching a car with a bomb in the trunk, trying to figure out how to defuse it, while a group of men (clearly the bomb-makers) are watching calmly from a nearby rooftop, hoping for his death. One of the men has a video camera. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
As Roger Ebert said, this film is nearly perfect.
The film is beautifully crafted and tricks you into thinking the carnage beautiful with its slow motion captures of exploding roadside bombs and its shimmering deserts seen through the scope of a sniper rifle. The film opens with a quotation from a New York Times war correspondent who states that "War is a drug." By the end of the film we understand the allure and know why the protagonist walks off the plane with adrenaline in his veins and rock music in his ears. In this world he is a powerful man, one with the ability and the taste for looking death in the face and beating it. You can tell this film is expertly written and acted because the viewer can see inside the heads of each of the characters without a lot of exposition.
The soldiers and specialists in the film are good at what they do, but that by no means guarantees their safety. This film has long stretches of incredible tension. There aren't any cheap tricks like false alarms and jangly music to make you jump. It simply lays out the scene and lets you know how close everyone is to death at each second. In one scene the protagonist is frantically searching a car with a bomb in the trunk, trying to figure out how to defuse it, while a group of men (clearly the bomb-makers) are watching calmly from a nearby rooftop, hoping for his death. One of the men has a video camera. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
As Roger Ebert said, this film is nearly perfect.
