You're in For a World of Hurt Locker

Another day brings me another gigantic movie I've never seen. This time around it's the 6 time Oscar winning movie The Hurt Locker. Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner as Sergent James, bomb specialist. Not much plot to summarize here. He's a member of a bomb squad, and he goes out risking his life with every call for help. Can he survive? More importantly, will his reckless behavior get his team killed? I won't spoil anything like that, but you can read my impressions after the jump.


Where to start? I guess I'll start off with the thing I didn't really like about this movie. It had no story. They're just there, in the war, defusing bombs. I guess survival is all you can really hope for in a thriller, but I'm not really a big fan of thriller movies. I suppose the point of a war movie with no point is to have that reflect back on ourselves with the message of "war has no point." If that's the point, super job!

Don't get me wrong, the movie was still entertaining and I wasn't ever bored save for one scene with the team drinking in James' cabin. From the trailers I got the impression that we'd be seeing pretty much the same thing over and over and over again, culminating in that shot where he pulls up all the bombs around him (shown on the movie poster above). Turns out that's the first bomb he works on! They just get bigger and more messed up from there. I found each bomb scene they go to or whatever situation they find themselves in surprisingly different from the previous. At one point they're even in a sniper battle out in the middle of nowhere! Very cool stuff to be sure.

The characters were good, if not great. This is helped by the terrific acting across the board. I completely and totally believed these men were soldiers and bomb squad teammates. A few times I even forgot I was watching Renner, and thought he was a real bomb... guy. Excellent work on display here, and very natural. Also I loved how each soldier definitely had their own unique personalities, not just "military tough guy #4" but actual human beings stuck in hellish conditions.

The one note I'd like to end on is to compliment the way the director made you understand James' way of thinking. Characters frequently question him on why he's doing this or what makes him do it. Why isn't he freaked out working on these bombs in these conditions? It isn't until they show you his life back home that you finally understand. And it's with a simple shot of a cereal isle in the grocery store. It was at that moment that I heard myself think "get out of here, this place is horrible". I don't think that can be explained without seeing The Hurt Locker.

So was this movie deserving of it's multitude of awards in my eyes? Of course it is! It's most definitely a great movie, but not my personal favorite in any way. The fact that the movie just consists of them going out on mission after mission just bugs me, but the more I think about it, the more I think that was probably done on purpose. See it. It's a good tense movie, and has some sweet explosions in all kinds of different situations.