The Hurt Locker, Blu-ray (2010)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Antony Mackie, Ralph Fiennes
Studio: Summit Entertainment [1/12/10]
Video: 1.78:1 for 16:9 widescreen, 1080p HD
Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio; English Dolby 2.0 surround; Spanish DD 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Extras: Audio commentary with director and writer Bark Boal, “The Hurt Locker: Behind the Scenes,” Image Gallery
Length: 130 minutes
Rating: *****
Well, so does Hurt Locker deserve the big upset at the Oscars of acing out Avatar with five Academy Awards? Perhaps, although still a bit hard to understand. Although I’m not a big fan of war movies, this is one of the great war movies, taking a quite different tack in exploring the personalities of three different soldiers in Iraq who specialize in the de-fusing of IEDs – which is the major challenge of the war there. They are the members of Bravo Company’s Explosive Ordanance Disposal (EOD) squad. Bigelow (the ex-wife of Avatar’s James Cameron) has been an action film director and uses an excellent cinematographer who has a way of giving a compelling documentary feeling to a fiction film. We see some things from the viewpoint of the soldiers rather than from the outside. When they travel to a mission in their sitting-duck humvee the viewer feels almost like a fourth member of their team, sitting in the back seat. I hadn’t known they often made use of robotic-controlled vehicles to check out EIDs at a distance.
The film’s setting is Iraq in 2004 (though it was shot in Jordan), but there is little politics displayed here. War is just the job the three soldiers are doing, and for the one played by Renner it is like a drug – he has become mentally unbalanced – a “wild man,” jonesing for the adrenalin rush of extreme life-and-death situations. He keeps under his bed the titled Hurt Locker – a container with bomb triggers and “other parts that could have killed me.” His other two teammates don’t know how to deal with his continuously inviting danger. The relationships of the three soldiers is the main plot line of the film. The level of tension conveyed is amazing – one feels almost as if one is putting ones’ own life on the line to defuse these homemade bombs. We’re caught between the desire of most of the soldiers to be nice guys in this difficult country, while having to be always vigilant and suspicious. One innocent team psychologist is blown up by an IUD because he is entirely too trusting of the natives. Some vets who have served in Iraq have attacked the inaccurate uniforms and markings on vehicles in the film, and the fact that two of the three soldiers get away with acting like gun-toting cowboys, answering to nobody – while in actuality they would have a commanding officer who would be keeping them in line. The soldiers are in the final days of a year-long stint, and wondering if their jobs will kill them before their time is out. The tremendous and awful impact of the war on the Iraqis is not ignored either.
The documentary look of the fiction film doesn’t detract from its very high-quality images, beautifully transferred to Blu-ray. Of course there are also the videos, night-vision shots, and the objective images seen by the soldiers when working in their blast-protected suits and helmets. The multichannel soundtrack also shakes one up considerably with the expected explosions. My little subwoofer was almost jumping off its metal-ball feet at a couple points. The documentary on the making of the film answers quite a few questions about the production.
— John Sunier
