The Hurt Locker

It might be that the wounds haven’t yet healed, or that the pro-war, patriotic section of America won’t hear the voices that oppose the conflict, but, for whatever reasons, Hollywood’s attempts at meaningfully portraying the war in Iraq have, by and large, failed. Box-office figures for the likes of Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop/Loss and Redacted, films which, to varying degrees of success, all took issue at America’s War on Terror in the Middle East, don’t make for good reading, so it’s interesting to see how The Hurt Locker, the latest film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days), is being so widely lavished with praise.

It tells the story of Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a soldier assigned to a special bomb-disposal unit to replace the previous team leader, Staff Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce), who is killed while trying to deactivate an improvised explosive device (or IED) in a town square in Baghdad. The film begins with a tense sequence showing the lead-up to Thompson’s death. The unit – Thompson, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) – first sends in a robot to dismantle the IED by remote control; the camaraderie and banter between the three men a sign that they’re a strong team, calm, at ease with each other, and completely full of trust. The robot breaks down, however, and Thompson makes the decision to go in himself, donning the special bomb-disposal suit and approaching the device under the watchful eyes of his two colleagues, who are primed to look out for any possible dangers or disruptions. Bigelow ramps up the suspense by streeeetttttcccchhhhing time to its fullest limits, with Thompson taking short, unbearable baby steps towards the bomb, reporting his progress every few paces until he’s in the ‘kill zone’, the IED’s blast radius, the place he’ll leave only in pieces if the bomb goes off. He deactivates the IED and is setting off slowly back to safety when Eldridge spots a man at a nearby butcher’s stall holding a mobile phone. Both Eldridge and Sanborn know what this means but they’re too late; the man dials a number into the phone and detonates the bomb, killing Thompson instantly.

When we encounter Sergeant James, the unit’s new leader, for the first time, he’s telling Sanborn that he doesn’t intend to step into Thompson’s shoes; he’s just there to do his job. He’s strangely relaxed, removing the protective coverings from the windows of his barracks (‘I like the sunshine’) and kicking back on his cot listening to music. Where Sanborn seems to be the ultimate professional, attuned to any sort of risk and determined, as any soldier would be, to steer himself and anyone else clear of it, James seems to almost welcome the danger, as proven by his first bomb disposals with the unit.
The set pieces Bigalow constructs to show James’ complete ignorance of, or disregard for, the risk he’s exposed to are brilliantly done and, at times, hilarious. In the first of these, the unit is sent to dismantle an IED which is buried under trash and debris in a deserted section of the city. Though Sanborn advises sending in the robot to investigate, James immediately rejects the suggestion and opts to go in himself, putting on the bombsuit and sauntering casually towards the kill zone. He sets off a smoke bomb to create a diversion, much to the chagrin of Sanborn and Eldridge, who are there to provide surveillance and rifle cover. James cuts the wires on the first bomb, only to discover another longer cable leading off away from him. It’s a superb moment, shot from directly above, when James softly yanks the cable out from beneath the dust and rubble and unearths another four or five of the same IEDs, all connected to each other. Where most people, at this point, would probably shit their pants, with James it’s a trifling inconvenience – like he’s opened a bottle of milk to find it slightly curdled – and he calmly goes about neutralising the bombs one by one. When he returns to his unit moments later, Sanborn chastises him for his recklessness.
The darkly comic tone of this scene is present throughout most of the film, and it’s certainly refreshing given the subject matter. (You’ll do well to find laughs in Rendition and Lions for Lambs, for example.) It reminded me of the HBO series, Generation Kill, written, as with The Hurt Locker, by a journalist who was embedded with the US army in Iraq, which both portrayed the American soldier as one who largely welcomes the opportunity to put his life on the line and showed that many elements of war are humorous and ridiculous. (It’s not a new idea, but one which doesn’t seem to have been widely explored in relation to Iraq. As I said, maybe, in some cases, the wounds are still too fresh.)

Regrettably, but inevitably, the suspense that propels the first half hour of the film eventually subsides, when the unit, out in the desert, encounters a team of British private militants, led by Ralph Fiennes, and eventually becomes embroiled in a firefight with unseen Iraqi insurgents. All of the Brits, bar one, are shot, and Sanborn and James are forced into a slow watch-and-wait cat-and-mouse sniping game with the Iraqis, who are hidden in a building way off in the distance. It’s here, and in the macho male bonding scenes that follow, that the relationships between the three men in the unit are initially cemented, as James seems to finally take on the responsibility of team leader and helps the panic-stricken Eldridge, who, as we’ve seen earlier in the film, is having trouble coping with both Thompson’s death and his own vulnerability.

Not every part of The Hurt Locker works. There’s a distracting subplot in which James befriends a young Iraqi boy, ‘Beckham’, who hangs around the soldiers’ camp selling fake DVDs. Later in the film, the unit is on a mission reconnoitering an abandoned warehouse which insurgents have been using as a hideout for making IEDs when they discover the dead body of a boy. Although the boy’s face is bloody and disfigured, James is convinced it is Beckham – Sanborn and Eldridge aren’t so sure – and explains that the insurgents were intending to use the boy’s corpse to make a ‘body bomb’; indeed, James cuts open the boy’s chest and finds explosives planted in it. The impact Beckham’s apparent death seems to have on James doesn’t quite correspond to how his character has been presented to us so far. OK, so we see that he is human – who wouldn’t be traumatised by such an experience? – but, until now, our impressions of him are that he’s an adrenaline junkie, at home in the army; a guy who you’d expect to mark the killing of a child down to the unnecessary yet inescapable collateral damage of war. The fact that James then sets out on a rogue mission to find Beckham’s house and track down the people responsible for the ‘body bomb’ doesn’t quite ring true. (Incidentally, Beckham turns up alive and well later.)

All war films tend to make some sort of judgement; usually, in its most boiled-down form, that the act of war is futile. Some, rightly or wrongly, set out to glorify military action and bestow hero status on the men whose stories they’re telling. Few, however, go to pains to encapsulate the thrill some men get from participating in the conflict. As the quote that begins The Hurt Locker says, ‘War is a drug’, and, however unfathomable it may be, there are men out there who find their only true place in life is in the military. There’s a scene towards the end of the film when James returns home to his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and child, and we see his discomfort at having to visit the supermarket and do odd jobs around the house. Home is the last place he feels at home in. He tells his child that the boy will grow up to learn that sometimes there’s only one thing in life a man can love. In James’ case, it’s the thrill of war, and the film ends with him disembarking the plane in Baghdad for another 365 days in rotation.

The Hurt Locker isn’t flawless, but it’s undoubtedly a fine film and deserved of all its plaudits. Bigelow’s direction is taut and assured, and her typically accomplished handling of action scenes and set-pieces (a la Point Break) is once again in evidence. With British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93, The Wind That Shakes The Barley) on board, the film is visually spectacular; the ruin and heat of Baghdad made to look, at times, breathtakingly beautiful. The cast is marvellous too: despite being relatively unknown as far as lead actors go, Renner, Mackie and Geraghty each turn in superb performances, particularly Renner, who possesses the laconic swagger needed to do justice to William James, screenwriter Mark Boal’s brilliantly fashioned character, a composite of several soldiers he encountered in his time in Iraq, all of whom got that same satisfaction from being there, in the desert, waiting for that next hit, the drug of combat.