The Hurt Locker (2008) - Kathryn Bigelow

The Hurt Locker (2009)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: Mark Boal
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly, Christian Camargo

Well I keep hear nothing but good things about Kathryn Bigelow and her newest movie The Hurt Locker (2009). Now that she has won the top prize at Director’s Guild of America Awards, her film is getting even more and more Oscar buzz. That means it was about time for me to see this movie. I was a little worried though, there was so much hype that I didn't see how it could live up to it all.

Most movie never live up to their hype and this movie wasn't any different. I thought it was a good movie but not a great movie. It just didn't do much for me. The movie had a few exciting and tense action sequences but honestly there wasn't much more to the movie than that. It attempted to have a message about war being a drug and it questioned how exactly soldiers are supposed to live in the real world after the experience of war. This message has been done before and much better by many movies in the past. This movie is just too shallow for the message to really work.

The shallowness of the movie comes from just how shallow all the characters are. None of the main characters in this film have any dimension to them at all. They are the same stock characters that show up in every war movie that has ever existed. This would be fine if they had some other personality going for them but they don't. There is nothing to distinguish these characters from the characters of most other war movies.

The main character, William James, is the gung-ho military character that plays by all his own rules but manages to never get into any trouble. Even though he puts everyone around him in danger his methods always work so everyone lets his behavior slide. He breaks every rule in the book and everyone just constantly looks the other way. This character is reckless for the sake of being reckless; he is such the stereotypical reckless and dangerous character that if this movie has been made in the late '80s the role would have been tailor made for Tom Cruise.

The other two main characters are not much better. First you have Owen Eldridge who plays the military character that obviously never should have joined the military. He doesn't have what it takes mentally to make make it through a war. He is scared of everything. Now I know everyone is going to feel fear during war time but this is that character that you can tell doesn't have what it takes to be in the military. However, his fear is used to manipulate audience into feeling bad for him. The truth is that the character is played so over the top that he just doesn't seem real and therefor I had a hard time feeling anything for him.

The next team member is JT Sanborn and he is slightly more realistic than the other two characters but not by much. He isn't as over the top as the other two characters, in fact he is portrayed as a normal, good soldier who is doing his best to stay alive and serve his country. My only problem with him is that I found it hard to believe that he would have let William James get away with all his dangerous behavior. I don't buy that he wouldn't have said something to a commanding officer about how much danger William was putting the team through. He seemed like too good of a soldier to let things like that pass.

Now, a lot of the praise this movie has gotten is for its realistic portrayal of a war zone. That doesn't fly for me. I didn't really see anything that realistic about how the military was portrayed in the film. There were far too many times in the film where characters were going off on their own and getting into trouble. I am sure these things don't happen in the military and if they did there would be consequences. For example, William James sneaks off the base at night and goes out into the war zone alone and then is able to get back on to the base without any kind of reprimand for leaving the base. I am sorry, I just don't buy that. Now, perhaps I should not fault the movie for being unrealistic because the film makers may not have been going for realism. Since the realism was touted by all the critics, that is one of the things I was expecting though.

In the end, the movie was pretty good but it was not great. It is not the best movie I saw all year and is most definitely not the best directed movie I saw all year so it really deserves neither of those awards. It had some exciting action sequences but that just wasn't enough for me in a movie that is getting as much Oscar buzz as this one. When it comes down to it my friend Paul was able to sum up the film perfectly in one sentence; it "carries itself like a serious war drama but it's really at best a decent action film."

Rating: 6/10