Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

The Hurt Locker Review

The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is the latest movie on the Iraq War to seek a commercial and emotional response from what has proven in recent years to be a tough crowd–an American public that has shown little interest in these war narratives. Redacted, Stop-Loss, and The Lucky Ones all failed to earn even half their budget. It says something about The Hurt Locker, and Bigelow, that I feel an urge to watch the others after seeing the movie two Mondays ago at its screening in the Hollywood Theatre as part of the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival. I don’t know whether I will. And I don’t know if others will watch The Hurt Locker. But I should watch them. And you should watch The Hurt Locker. I’ll leave the plot summarizing to the critics. I want to focus on the question of engaging the viewer, a question we are confronting every day this summer in the Institute.

Writing this 10 days after viewing the film I struggle to remember specific examples, which perhaps speaks to the challenge any film faces to leave a mark in our overloaded memories, but what I am left with even after so much time is a desire to do this film justice in my description of it to others, to make others feel that it matters. Why?
Watching the film, I was nervous that I was hooked only because it was so pretty, so damn pretty in fact that you can’t help but feel it must be a little wrong. I considered challenging Bigelow when in a post-film Q&A she stated that she wanted the movie to depict war as realistically as possible. In The Hurt Locker, war becomes almost, well, sexy. And I’m still nervous that this is why I liked it. The sound is so phenomenal—pulsing and playful, yanking or guiding the viewer along; the visuals so compelling—a bullet shell flips end over end as it leaves the gun and falls to the sand; not a new idea, the slo-mo gunshot, but somehow feeling new, raw. Yet Bigelow’s film stops short of glamorizing war. To me, glamour equals style without substance. And this film definitely had substance. Proof of it could be seen with one look around the theatre. I saw more audience reactions to this film than any I can remember. Looking to either side of me, I watched my fellow fellows run the gamut of what seemed almost exaggerated responses, but real; they literally were on the edge of their seats, anticipating; they literally cringed in horror and disgust; literally sat slack-jawed, gaping in wonder; and at times even resorted to putting their head in their hands and taking a moment away from it all to shake their heads in disbelief. It took me till the Q&A to figure out what they were reacting to. The characters.

Bigelow emphasized that when she’s making a film, the characters are the most important part. It shows. Many scenes offered a fresh take on the life of a soldier, such as the scene of one soldier playing an unnamed shoot-em-up video game shortly after being in a real life shoot-em-up scene on the Iraq streets. Clearly something resonated as real, because near the end of the Q&A the wife of a veteran of the Iraq War rose in the audience and said that this film more than any other captured the experience of war that she has heard from her husband and other soldiers. Having just finished a short audio documentary on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I, in my far more limited knowledge, agree. Even a scene near the end that felt essentially tacked-on captured the struggles in a way that hasn’t been done before, in a very human way that I think people could relate to. The main character Staff Sergeant William James deals with the monotony of grocery shopping compared to the adrenaline-rush thrill of facing death. We all go grocery shopping. We know it’s not a daily highlight. So even though we don’t shoot strangers in alleys or call in airstrikes or disarm bombs, after two hours of tasting the excitement of war–good, bad and horrid–we felt for a moment the boredom that Staff Sgt. James must feel. We understood, even if just a little, an experience we can’t possibly comprehend. I knew before the scene faded out what the next cut would be, him marching again to war. I’m not sure how Ms. Bigelow can get so inside the hearts and heads of both her subjects and her audience, but as an aspiring creative media maker, be it writer or who knows, perhaps the highest compliment I can pay her is that I left Hollywood Theater with a desire to contact her ask if I could assist on her next project to see how she does it.