Review #1549: The Hurt Locker.
Cast:
Jeremy Renner (Sergeant Sergeant William James), Anthony Mackie (Sergeant J. T. Sanborn), Brian Geraghty (Specialist Owen Eldridge), Guy Pearce (Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson), Christian Camargo (Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge), David Morse (Colonel Reed), Ralph Fiennes (Contractor Team Leader), Evangeline Lilly (Connie James), and Christopher Sayegh (Beckham) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (#1258 - K-19: The Widowmaker)
Review:
"War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat."
The artist can come from anywhere, whether for film or beyond that, no matter how much time it takes to develop their craft or find a following with viewers. Kathryn Bigelow gradually found a place within cinema with her style of handling action cinema. She had actually started out originally striving for study in fine art (specifically painting), graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1972. She spent a few years as a starving artist, being involved with conceptual art, and appearing in a few short films, but she subsequently entered Columbia University to study theory and criticism in the film program, stating film as becoming "the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting.”, and she started making her own short films with The Set-Up in 1978 (while noting the two films that opened up her landscape to film being The Wild Bunch and Mean Streets in their irreverence and intensity). Since beginning her feature career with The Loveless (1981), Bigelow has directed a variety of genres that generally deal with violence or thrills of some kind,, which resulted in a diverse quality of films that ranged from cult films like Near Dark (1987), to hit action films like Point Break (1991) to ones that did not find enough audience appeal like K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) for a career of so far ten films in a career of nearly four decades.
For this film, she wanted to do the film on her own control with less-known actors (the ones you would associate as name actors in Fiennes and Pearce are here less than ten minutes, and even less for Morse) and filming in the Middle East (which was done in Jordan), which would entail some extremely hot conditions for its crew (particularly for those wearing bomb-proof Kevlar. For me, the only thing that I was really curious about was to see how it fared in its dealings with war and the people around it in the context of its decade (particularly within world events). The film was written by Mark Boal, a journalist that previously had one of his articles turned into a film that he co-wrote with In the Valley of Elah (2007). Boal was embedded with troops and bomb squads for a time in 2004 in Iraq, and he used those observations and interviews to make the script, and he would also serve as a co-producer. What we have here is a film wrapped in tension and careful planning for people who move toward danger rather than run from it. In that sense, Renner does quite well in his reckless edge that suits the desire to stay on the pulse that feeds upon the pressure on his hands with calm conviction. Mackie goes along with well-mannered effectiveness in the simple act of trying to maintain oneself under pressure that might also resonate in some way with perspective like Renner if one thinks about it in some way. Geraghty certainly ranks as the reserved one of the main group, but he holds his own in trying to maintain one's sense of self with the unpredictability and brazen nature of what happens in these fragmented moments here. It wraps itself in modern warfare with fair conviction in capturing what is necessary in intricate experiences with our main trio of actors that resembles documentary-style filmmaking at times without becoming spectacle for the sake of it or wrapped up in fervor of too many message-making - leaving it to the viewer for better or worse. Its a fragmented film, wrapped with its trio with occasional perspective to the surroundings around them while focusing on the circumstances (and tensions) that wind them up instead. In this case, I would say it makes a good experience in ferocity for 131 minutes that captures the drive necessary in some way to carry on with its tour of service without becoming consumed in macho fervor that connects the dots in sobering interest for adrenaline-laced perspective that makes a useful curiosity for its time as a middle-ground winner.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
