The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a modern super hero film sneakily disguised as an intensely real war drama. The film follows a US army unit tasked to dismantle IED's in Iraq. The film opens with the unit's previous commander getting killed in an explosion, he's replaced by our film's protagonist Sgt. James, a bomb defusing whiz (873 to date) whose loose and relaxed style clashes with his more by the book team members. Even though that description sounds cliche the way the film portrays their relationship manages to be anything but (at least most of the time). The bomb sequences are incredibly gripping, and a battle in the desert was one of the most engaging sequences I've seen in any film this year. The film isn't perfect, the effort spent trying to explain James' motivations is generally clumsy, and alot of the interaction between the unit members away from the battle field feels forced but these are minor issues, and I highly recommend seeking this film out.

Now back to my earlier super hero comment. As the film goes on the James character reminded me more and more as Batman. Not the old Adam West batman, but the new Dark Knight version. While all of the situations we see him engaged in feel real, and the danger is palaptable, by the end of the film I eventually got the sense that this guy was so much better than everyone else that, even though he could very much experience pain and self doubt (like new Batman), he was probably going to prevail. Like Batman he's shown as being subject to erratic behavior and subject to his own form of mania, but this doesn't keep him from being 'the man.' The closing scene in the film I think puntuates this point nicely (you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it, and you will see it and not Transformers, right?). Why this angle is interesting to me is that most 'realistic' war films don't really try to set up the characters in this sort of hero light, if anything this harkened back to a more old fashioned form of film-making protagonists were always protrayed as being somewhat larger than life. Now the Hurt Locker implies this in a much more subtle way than, say, The Sands of Iwo Jima but the undercurrent is definitely there and it made the film a little more interesting to watch.