More war and more deserts! - "The Hurt Locker" (2009)

Ok, so we said we’d lay off war and desert movies for a while then headed straight to La Premiere for “The Hurt Locker”. The first Oscar winning female director and damn did she earn it! It was an incredible film. I think Mat may have stopped breathing a few times and I caught myself holding my breath like I was going to set off a bomb if I didn’t!

The shoot must have been a nightmare, everyone got sick and suffered under hideous desert heat, but they produced a really different movie looking at the life of a small number of soldiers in an extreme occupation and explored the idea of an ‘action junkie’ really well. One scene shows a recently returned soldier standing in the American ‘super sized’ cereal aisle; his ability to comprehend such a scene is as impaired as our ability to comprehend walking into a building and working out the most likely places to hide a bomb to cause maximum damage. It’s a great exploration of what we ask these soldiers to do and how they are fundamentally altered by their experiences.

There are some fantastic actors cropping up in small (and usually quickly lethal roles) but the leads are mainly unknown which actually helps the ‘everyman’ feel. These guys could be anyone and the constant wild swings between high intensity sheer boredom (e.g., waiting out a sniper trap) to high intensity, high adrenaline active disarming or explosions messes so much with the audience’s heads enough – it’s hard to imagine what it’s doing to these guys. The tension is expertly handled and there are some incredible and really innovative shots (watch out for the slow-motion shot of rust being blown off a car!)

We rated this really highly because we felt it was an important story being told in a quite a new way. We felt the innovations in story-telling and pacing should work to reach and affect an increasingly cynical and shock-proof audience because the film does a good job relating these ‘action junkies’ to other kinds of addictions, which may help to make it more accessible to modern (non-military) audiences.

Plus despite the free soft drink – neither of us even considered leaving for a bathroom break! That’s always a good sign and helps us rate “The Hurt Locker”, 91% (Mat) and 89% (Danielle).