Classic Movie Review: The Hurt Locker

Best Picture: # 82
Original Release Date: June 26, 2009
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 11 minutes
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: Mark Boal

Quick Impressions:
It’s a damp, drizzly November, but the kids have school tomorrow, so we won’t be able to go to sea anytime soon. (I don’t know why I’m making Moby Dick jokes! This isn’t a review of Zero Dark Thirty!) Anyway, I decided it was a perfect evening to try a new potato soup recipe and watch The Hurt Locker. The potato soup was enthusiastically received by everyone (except my eight-year-old who preferred to fill his bowl with Cinnamon Toast Crunch). And we all liked The Hurt Locker more than we expected, too (again, except the eight-year-old who spent its entire runtime assiduously watching How to Care for a Kitten videos on his tablet because he already knows what we’re getting for Christmas).

The Hurt Locker came out in 2009, the year my daughter was born. We didn’t see it in theaters, but I don’t think we were the only ones who missed its initial theatrical run. I remember its ascent to Oscar glory being pretty quiet until the very end.

It was released on June 26, and our daughter was released from a hundred-day stay in the NICU on April 12. After she came home, the only movie we saw together in the theater that year was Avatar at Christmas. I did see Precious at Thanksgiving with my sister (who picked it) and my parents. But that meant my husband could stay with the baby. Both of us went together (with our older son) to see Avatar. That didn’t work as well for me. I was as stressed out to leave the baby as Jeremy Renner made everyone else while defusing those bombs. I was also terrified of catching something and bringing it home to her. When I found a used Kleenex in my cupholder, my husband had to defuse me. Our outing was a lot like that late Hurt Locker scene with the bolt cutters. My husband probably should have brought a blow torch. With my daughter out of sight, I felt the pressure of the ticking clock whole time.

Originally, we watched The Hurt Locker on a Netflix DVD in March of 2010. I tried to watch all the Best Picture nominees, as usual, but the field had expanded to ten, and we weren’t going out. I’m pretty sure we weren’t able to see A Serious Man or An Education before the ceremony. I still haven’t seen them. (And yet I’m only “pretty sure” we didn’t see them before the ceremony. Only a Sith deals in absolutes, I guess.)

I think the reason I wasn’t too impressed with The Hurt Locker originally is that our very alert baby was watching it with us. She came home at a gestational age of newborn and a birth age of three months. She was tiny, but if I put something on the TV, she watched it. (Attentively. She would gurgle back at the characters on Sesame Street from the jump.) That’s the reason I quit watching True Blood (even though my sister was trying to get me into it). By the time she was one, that attentive baby watched TV as well as I did which made this crop of Oscar nominees hard to view at home. The graphic, gritty, unpleasant content of The Hurt Locker probably concerned me. (Strangely, my favorite film of those ten nominees was Inglorious Basterds. The surprise of the revenge fantasy ending won me over. She must have been asleep!)

The other reason I’ve never been big on The Hurt Locker is that my mother was such a vocal champion of Avatar and eventually wore me down with her ardent insistences that it should have won Best Picture. I never embraced Avatar with the wild enthusiasm of my mother, but of the two films, I liked The Hurt Locker less. (Honestly, the first ten minutes of Up is probably better than anything else that year.)

Zero Dark Thirty remains my Kathryn Bigelow movie of preference. That I find immensely compelling. Oddly enough, when my sister recently told me she liked The Hurt Locker, she recalled after some conversation that she was actually thinking of Zero Dark Thirty. And then when my husband tried to remember The Hurt Locker, he also mixed it up with Zero Dark Thirty. I don’t know why Zero Dark Thirty didn’t get as much acclaim as The Hurt Locker. It obviously made a bigger impression on my family.

(“Did I even see The Hurt Locker?” my husband kept wondering aloud.)

“What’s Zero Dark Thirty about?” my daughter asked tonight.

I told her, “Jessica Chastain is looking for Osama Bin Laden.”

She asked, “And does she find him?”

“Yeah,” I said, “and then she’s like,” I shrugged, “What do I do now?” (It’s a great ending. You really feel it.)

I’m a bit obsessive (just a teeny, tiny bit). I can easily imagine her pouring all her professional energies into the hunt for Bin Laden, and then when it’s over, what on earth is she supposed to do? What does that leave her with?

Until this viewing, I didn’t notice that The Hurt Locker has similar themes and an equally obsessive protagonist. It also focuses on the anticlimax and let down that come after intense work has ended. The difference is, Jessica Chastain achieves a unique, long-term goal, whereas Jeremy Renner merely achieves repeated micro-goals while completing a tour of duty. He’s still able to sign up for another tour doing the same work. There are always more bombs to defuse.

In fairness to me, until Zero Dark Thirty existed, I couldn’t notice any similarities between the two films. And I can’t say I missed those themes in The Hurt Locker the first time. That’s blatantly the point of the movie, the endless anticlimax of both his return to civilian life and his subsequent return to the front. But I think I like The Hurt Locker better now that Zero Dark Thirty exists to pair with it. Maybe that’s because I prefer Jessica Chastain to Jeremy Renner. (Sorry, Jeremy Renner!) (Now the only person who reads this post will be Jeremy Renner.)

It also helps that my daughter is now a freshman in high school instead of a baby staring up at the screen hoping to see Madeline Kahn duetting with Grover.

The Good:
All the performances in this movie are quite good (including Jeremy Renner’s). That’s something I don’t remember from watching The Hurt Locker thirteen years ago. On this watch, the standout to me is Anthony Mackie. (I can’t get the image of Renner reading this and growing increasingly despondent out of my head.) It’s not that I dislike Renner’s performance. But this may be my favorite ever performance by Mackie (though I’ll admit to Marvel fatigue which may sway my judgment). Even though the movie features heightened tension and explosions, Mackie plays Sanborn with subtlety, often quiet frustration. He’s sympathetic and usually reasonable, but there’s a hint of menace lurking just below the surface.

To be honest, I find his character, Sgt. Sanborn, somewhat more interesting than Renner’s Staff Sgt. James. (It’s the way they’re written. There’s nothing wrong with Renner’s performance.) It’s just fascinating that Sanborn is so aggravated by James’s refusal to follow the rules, yet his solution to James being a loose canon is, “What if we murdered him? Just kidding. Kinda. Wink. Wink. Side-eye. Silence.” That scene is something else! I mean, Sanborn’s right to be annoyed by James’s behavior. It’s needlessly risky, not by the book, and often puts others in danger. Early on, Sanborn establishes himself as the reliable, responsible, sensible one. He’s very sympathetic. And then suddenly, he’s like, “But you know, we could just murder him, though.” Then he refuses to say if he’s kidding. You look into his eyes and realize, “Everybody is going crazy out here!”

That’s another aspect of the film that I like. All the characters are feeling the strain of their surreal job. It’s like Catch-22 but not a comedy. Sanborn is the most sane, practical one, and he’s toying with the idea of murdering James (perhaps even vaguely alluding to murdering him to persuade someone else to get his hands dirty, pulling a Henry II).

It’s astonishing that Brian Geraghty’s Eldridge survives and remains in action as long as he does. Every minute with this man is so nerve-wracking. All his interactions with the doctor, Colonel Cambridge (Christian Camargo) are particularly torturous. Both actors are engaging to watch every time they’re on screen, but the impending sense of doom surrounding these two is just painful.

We also get a couple of great near-cameos from Guy Pearce (who then plays Edward VIII in next year’s winner The King’s Speech) and Ralph Fiennes (whom I completely forgot was in the movie).

I had just noted how much the landscape shots in the desert reminded me of The English Patient, and then Fiennes showed up out of nowhere. We don’t even know it’s him at first! He slowly reveals his hidden face!

“Jump scare!” my daughter joked.

Almost all my cousins on my dad’s side are active or retired military. But all I really know about war I’ve learned from movies, books, and TV shows. These men are in such a strange situation. I identify with the intense focus and the rush of defusing the bomb under pressure. Of all things, this reminds me of Jeopardy! (I’m sure if I were a career soldier, I’d think of a more appropriate association.) I can see why that would be satisfying work. Who wouldn’t like the tantalizing pairing of the adrenaline rush and the finite nature of the task?

But then, outside of defusing the bombs, these characters seem to be making no forward progress. I guess that’s because their job is one thing, defusing bombs. How is the rest of the war going? What do the other soldiers do? Are battles being fought? Won? Lost? Is overall progress being made? The bomb squad has endless micro-goals, but none of them builds toward a larger goal. Every new encounter is its own thing. Yet each time, the goal is the same—don’t let the bomb go off. Then their reality resets again with the next bomb. There is always a next bomb. And wouldn’t it be weird to be defusing a bomb while random civilians stand and watch you provocatively, especially when you’re aware that 1) any one of these bystanders might have set the bomb and 2) any of them might detonate it at any moment?

What a surreal nightmare! No wonder they all start cracking up! Under such strange circumstances, I would not be able to stay very sane, I’m afraid.

Given this uniquely stressful situation, it’s not surprising nobody doing this job is of very sound mind at this point. Probably the most interesting aspect of the film (for me) is that as James responds to the pressure, I get the idea he’s seen the same movies and shows I have. He acts like he’s a character in a movie. He’s Maverick in Top Gun. He’s Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. He’s the hero of an 80s action movie. He doesn’t do anything by the book. He takes extraordinary risks, yet he gets amazing results, the best results, as only a cinematic loose canon can.

In the middle of the movie, Sanborn finally accepts James. James wins him over. And then James proceeds to go completely off the rails. He appears to be living out an action movie in his own mind. Fueled by an act he takes personally, he goes on a quest for revenge that inevitably devolves into madness, then never really gets resolved. This part of the film interests me. Mainly I love the contrast between the film’s realism and James’s departure from reality. What I mean is, the movie is realistic because we never fully understand what has happened because there is no simple explanation tying all these events together. Yet James behaves as if he’s living inside a fictional story where there’s some mastermind behind everything, lurking in the darkness. The tension between James’s understanding of what’s happening and the audience’s understanding is so provocative. He almost knows what’s going on. We never have any idea what’s going on, and yet we have a better grasp of the situation than he does.

All the time, my husband says to me, “You cannot read reality as if it’s a book. This doesn’t require a close reading. It’s just reality happening.”

I do tend to overread. (Sometimes, though, I’m like, “Are you sure you’re not under-reading?”) With encouragement, I would make a fine conspiracy theorist (but I try to discourage those qualities in myself when I notice them). This same skillset made me fantastic at interpreting passages in English class and writing compelling, insightful essays. But sometimes I get carried away and veer into A Beautiful Mind territory, seeing meaning and messages where there is really only a bunch of stuff happening.

James is trying to make a coherent story out of a real-life tragedy. That way, he’ll gain agency, possibly even closure. In the hands of a less capable director, this business of the boy bomb would take over the entire story, and the whole thing would devolve into genre fiction. (At least, I know that’s what I would do with it.)

Best Action Sequence:
What has happened to Beckham? The scene in that abandoned building when they find the child’s body loaded with explosives is pivotal and transformative. First of all, two major plot points that are heavily foreshadowed happen in this sequence. We’ve been waiting for and dreading both events. Both occurrences are the type of thing that always happen in war movies. I think James is aware of this (from having grown up watching movies). To give meaning to the senseless murder of a child, he builds a story around it, a mystery he can solve.

James’s subsequent determination to investigate the child’s murder ends up being a bizarre interlude. When that doesn’t work out, he can’t let go of the idea of solving something and ends up investigating something else, nearly getting one of his colleagues killed. I think he suddenly turns detective because of an eerie, subconscious awareness that there’s no sense, logic, or forward progression to what he’s doing day-to-day. All he does is defuse bombs. All he accomplishes is not dying. But nothing builds upon anything else. Deep inside, he must have some sense like, “There’s no point to any of this!” So he looks for a mystery to solve. And when that doesn’t pan out, he looks for the next mystery to solve. This finally ends when he’s able to rescue someone (after his own actions endanger him). (It reminds me a little of Memento.)

This is the part of the movie that fascinates me. I’ve never been on the bomb squad, but I find this particular stress response highly relatable. I’d like to watch this section of the film again to make sure I’m interpreting it correctly—because I’m not completely sure. (Again, I get overzealous in looking for over-arching meaning. My husband says it’s because I’m a writer always looking for my plot. That’s generous. I worry it’s a little touch of schizophrenia. Imagine distant knocking, and I’m gasping, “It’s a secret code!” and my husband’s like, “No, Sarah! That’s a woodpecker!”) (“A woodpecker trained to deliver the secret code!!!!”) (Where can I get a woodpecker like that?)

The three of us are honestly a bit confused about the events in this section of the film. Is the child James finds on the table actually Beckham as he believes? Do the bombers then send a replacement “Beckham” to sell DVDs? Or is that a different child on the table? Does James ignore Beckham later because he can’t bear to face how out-of-control he became? Or maybe Beckham was always twins, or he has a magical chamber where he clones himself as part of an elaborate magic trick?

I’m going with B. I think the movie makes the most sense that way. But I could be wrong. Either way, this bizarre arc highlights how powerless James is over his own life. He just defuses the bombs. There’s no other meaning or direction. He’s only in control when he’s in the act of defusing the bomb.

Best Scene:
Before I rewatched this time, The Hurt Locker was just a big, sandy blur for me.

“I’m not even sure I watched the whole thing before,” my husband confided as scene after scene we didn’t remember passed before our eyes.

But I know I watched the whole thing because the one part I do remember vividly comes right at the end. (Surely I wouldn’t watch only the last fifteen minutes of a Netflix DVD! That makes no sense!)

My strongest, clearest memory of The Hurt Locker is that lingering moment of ennui at the grocery store when James briefly comes home to his wife and son. (In fact, I remembered that so much more clearly than the rest that I worried I was getting confused and remembering scenes from American Sniper.) (I’ll say this for Staff Sgt. James. His baby sure does look realistic!)

I love the way James stands, adrift, in the cereal aisle. I’ve never been on the bomb squad, but I feel that moment.

“This is how I feel when I go grocery shopping,” I confided, “right at the end.” (I always start out with such enthusiasm and joie de vivre, but by the end, I’m exhausted and having an existential crisis, overwhelmed by numbingly endless similar choices.)

On a first watch, I found the ending deeply unsatisfying, but those final scenes do pack a punch. You watch the movie and think, “How does someone readjust to normal society when he’s used to living like this?” And then at the end you realize, “Ah! I see! He doesn’t!”

Best Scene Visually:
I like Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography. In fact, it may be the strongest aspect of the movie. What impressed me most were all the triangles. I don’t know why there are so many triangles in The Hurt Locker, and I have nothing insightful (or even coherent) to say about them. There’s one really arresting shot of a vehicle with windshield wipers shown at a slant in the left corner of the screen, so we see it as a triangle. The longer I watched, the more triangular patterns I noticed in the shot composition. To make sense of this, I’d need to watch the film again. (Probably the Illuminati is behind it, or, maybe, as my husband suggested, Bill Cipher!) (Maybe it’s that woodpecker!)

There’s also a very raw, gritty feeling to the predominantly sandy environment. We’re always effortlessly in the action with the characters and don’t think anything of it. It can’t be easy to film all the explosions.

I know I’ve already mentioned it, but I’m intrigued by that sequence when they discover the child’s body filled with explosives. On this watch, the moment just before they discover it reminds me so much of the end of The French Connection. Visually, the two moments are eerily similar. I’m not sure what to make of that, but during this project I’ve been on the lookout for moments in Oscar movies that remind me of moments in earlier Oscar movies. The earlier party scene after the shootout in the desert had already reminded me of Platoon (which my daughter then volunteered was the only movie that had ever scared her). Are these visual echoes intentional? I have no idea.

The Negatives:
Back in 2010, everyone was asking, “Why can a woman win Best Director only when she makes a war movie with an almost entirely male cast?” That’s one thing that bothered me about The Hurt Locker at the time, too. Of course, in more recent years Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) have won Best Director for not entirely male-driven projects. And if Greta Gerwig wins this year for Barbie (which seems very possible), that’s a real gamechanger.

Personally, I’m not so concerned with how many male characters are in the film or whether they’re engaged in traditionally masculine pursuits. For me, the problem with The Hurt Locker is that it’s boring and ultimately unsatisfying (kind of like life if the only thing that gives you a thrill is defusing bombs.)

I could never make a movie like this. I would get distracted by the Beckham subplot. I’d get spellbound by Jeremy Renner’s character. I’d forget the movie was supposed to be realistic. I like the character’s version of events. That’s the story I would want to tell. With me, instead of gritty realism, you’d get sensationalized genre fiction.

To be honest, that would be a worse movie, but I would probably like it better.

Why is non-fiction so hard? Fiction just seems truer to me. Unless you’re writing something shocking, non-fiction runs the risk of seeming inadequate and superficial, whereas in fiction, you can unburden your soul of the full emotional truth. Oh well!

Overall:
I’m excited to show my daughter The Artist next because given her love of silent film, I know that will appeal to her. Strangely, though The Hurt Locker feels like it debuted in another lifetime, I have a hard time believing The Artist has been out for twelve years already. I feel like I just saw it so recently. I’ve already reviewed it on this blog, but I’ll probably write about it again because I’m sure my perspective has changed.

As for The Hurt Locker, it’s a much more engaging film than I remembered, but I still strongly prefer Zero Dark Thirty. (PS. If you want to improve your potato soup, add ancho chili powder!)