Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Ralph Fiennes

Director: Katherine Bigelow

Screenplay: Katherine Bigelow

Running time: 2 hrs 01 mins

Genre: Drama/Action/War



CRITIQUE:


Okay, we get it. War is futile. Thousands of men are deployed in distant lands to fight distant wars and unseen enemies for some politically unjustified and obscure cause. And if men don’t get killed, they go back home to their domestic lives psychologically scarred and almost defunct. War movies have this recurring thread of philosophy, from the mainstream glories of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan and even the leftfield arthouse ones like Waltz With Bashir, all saying the same thing – war is pointless. Meanwhile, in the face of a more modern war being fought, the Iraq war has recently found its own niche cinematically, founding a sub-genre that both portray and speculates the Middle-Eastern excursion of the West. And since we’ve had so much philosophising, politicking and parodying (check out Syriana, The Kingdom, Jarhead), it’s quite refreshing to see that Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker sidesteps all that moral sermon and personifies war “as a drug”, a hallucinogenic, adrenaline-fuelled, grit-covered operation that puts men in fatal situations. Good, then, that this is not just another recent addition to the ever-increasing canon. It’s probably the most irreverent yet most insightful movies ever made about the Iraq war.


From first frame to the last, it’s plain to see that Bigelow is not interested in the geopolitics and the powers that loggerhead nations against each other. Instead we are pummelled into the perspective of bomb disposal experts around the dust-beaten environs of Baghdad, disposing explosives deceptively hidden in the most mundane locations, may it be streets, under tires or inside car hoods. The actual war barely enter the screen, as Bigelow reduces combats as off-screen hints – helicopters flying around, sounds of missiles being fired – turmoil is all over the city, but this film is about the men with a dangerous mission, and all is at stake. It’s a rough, battering experience being shoved into this panorama of danger, so meticulously and precisely detailed with shaky, documentary-like camerawork, an intense in-your-face portrayal brimming with authenticity. As this is an action movie, so astonishingly directed by a woman, Bigelow focuses on the episodic narrative that swirls along Jeremy Renner’s Sgt. William James, a reckless bomb expert with such swaggering bravado, as he breaks rules and ignores team protocols. There is a sequence that could even make Hitchcock break a sweat, as James locates a complexly wired series of bombs buried under a street, proving that explosion isn’t the answer to genuine suspense, but rather the ticking of bomb and knowing that it’s going to blow off in a minutia of technical fault.


Nevertheless, Bigelow never lets her action set-pieces override her artistic credibility. When bombs do go off, the cinematography suddenly shifts from hand-held grittiness to a super-sharp, stylised observation of details; a mushrooming explosion, the tremor on sand particles and the force field that wipe out a place. The characterisation also becomes stronger throughout the film, as Bigelow studies masculinity and the male ego in the face of war, bringing a remarkable performance from Renner to the fore. His bomb expert is almost surgical in disposition, understanding the intricate wires of bombs as does a surgeon knows veins in a human body, and the whiff of danger keeps him high like a drug that when he’s sent back to domesticity, he couldn’t function like every other human around him. It’s a numbing allegory about the sacrifice of soldiers and the obsession of nations that deploy them to war.



VERDICT:

Impressive. The kinetic tension in this film is so compellingly orchestrated that it puts you at the edge of your seat and your heart in your throat. Don’t let the ‘Iraq war movie’ label misguide you; this is perhaps the best film made about the Iraq excursion, mainly because it eschews hectoring and politicking and rather portrays men in the face of a war bigger than their egos. Bigelow does this with a visceral eye and bleak, rough-hewn war poetry.



RATING: A