Hollywood depictions of war are too often dripping with the political leanings of people at the top of the movie’s food chain. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as liberal as the next liberal media type, but I don’t need film producers, directors and actors force-feeding their liberal attitude on the Middle East situation to me after I’ve forked over $10.25 for the privilege. I like to let my war movies let me think for myself.
Fortunately, “The Hurt Locker” (out now on DVD) allows me the freedom to do just that.
This film, up for a slew of prestigious awards (and the biggest shoe-in for a “Best Picture” Oscar nomination this side of “Avatar”), puts the audience in Baghdad, Iraq, 2004, a year after the war in that country got under way.
SSgt. Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the new team leader and bomb technician for the Bravo company, which has 38 days left in the rotation.
He is the inspiration behind the quote from war journalist Chris Hedges displayed at the beginning of the film: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
James is an adrenaline junkie in the guise of a team leader. He generally doesn’t behave as protocol demands, although he proves to be quite capable in dismantling IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which is his main responsibility.
His seemingly ho-hum attitude toward matters of life and death define his existence in the war zone. “There’s enough bang in there to send us all to Jesus,” he tells his crew after finding a car trunk full of bombs and removing his bomb protection suit. “If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die comfortably.”
“The Hurt Locker” essentially enlists the viewer alongside James, Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) to carry out missions. It shows how perceptions of life and death are skewed from the combat zones of Iraq, where living and dying are potentially a random IED or gunshot away from each other. In 2004 Baghdad, dying is simply a different way of ending your day than living is — there’s little sense or reason as to which path you take.
The movie helps put its audience on location by showing the more mundane side of combat life, such as the temporary relief of drinking from a juice pouch while waiting for insurgents to pop up in your sights in the desert. I could almost sense how good a sip of Capri-Sun would feel at that exact moment.
“The Hurt Locker” has the feel of a straight-up documentary, as there’s no real plot other than the plot of war. One mission to the next. The exciting, the boring and all in between.
One of the greatest strengths of “The Hurt Locker” lies in its attempts to show that these soldiers are any of us, just in an extremely different environment than those of us working in an office building on a Wednesday afternoon in small-town Ohio. Despite the tremendous death toll numbers reported in the media, taking lives does not come as second nature to them. There’s a genuine confusion of emotions that overcome a person — trained soldier or not — when you take the life of someone whose intentions are not clearly known. At the heart of it, these are good (at least as good as the rest of us) men in a very bad place.
The one scene in particular which stands out as the one destined to stick with viewers long past the end credits. It would be hard to capture more of the human spirit than is on display when James attempts to dismantle bombs attached to an innocent, kneeling civilian in the middle of a deserted street.
It’s not until the end of the film that it takes the time to reflect upon what it has spent the first 90 minutes establishing, that perhaps the impact of war is never really known until after it’s “over.” The movie is a slow burner, leaving its message to not blow up in our face or hit us over the head with its political stance, but rather let it slowly seep in for itself.
“The older you get, the fewer things you really love,” James says.
We all get our fix somehow, some way.
Joel Sensenig is news editor of the Review Times.