Critical review submitted for my United States History class:
"You know, after my first tour I told myself I was never coming back to this fucking hole. After my second tour I was one-hundred percent sure I was never coming back to this fucking hole. And all that to say, good luck getting that fucking degree when you get back to Ottawa, buds."
- Canadian Forces Sgt, Kandahar
The opening to Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker snaps the audience to attention. Everything feels very real - the cinematography catches the smothering combination of heat and light in the urban gingivitis of Iraq so well you can practically feel the sun squatting down on the back of your neck, or taste the dust and dried spit the Middle East tends to leave in your mouth. The American soldiers, Explosive-Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians all, go about their business with the effortless swagger of filthy-handed professionals - from their frosty back-and-forth about dick-sizes to the rattling off of ballistic predictions and other jargon. When Guy Pearce zips himself into the bomb-suit and moonwalks his way over to their daily find, you can smell the gym-bag blast-blanket stink inside his helmet, feel every footstep thumping against sizzling asphalt, and every bead of sweat crawling spider-like down the back of his neck. Kathryn Bigelow can convey atmosphere. When Zero Dark Thirty hit theaters in 2012, her audiences experienced the longest ten minutes of their lives inching their way through Osama Bin Laden's compound and unempathetically removing all human obstacles across a bed of spent casings. The Hurt Locker's opening sequence promises a riveting premise - the daily lives of deployed American EOD technicians against a backdrop of adrenaline and combat addiction.
Unfortunately, what The Hurt Locker actually delivers smells more like the inside of one.
Critical reception of the 2008 blockbuster was almost obnoxiously positive - its won nine more Oscars than it was worth and was joyously written-off by critics as "realistic", "harrowing", "powerful", and all the other spin-words movie critics use to market their Oscar winners. The negative backlash was almost exclusively from the military community, whose actual experiences conflicted drastically with the insipid, ignorant, and occasionally fantastical scenes depicted in the film. Jeremy Renner's cavalier attitude towards endangering his own team and lack of regard for his own personal safety inflamed the sensitivities of many returned veterans. Technical details, like the particular pattern of uniform worn by soldiers or the Vietnam-era helicopters which serve as MEDEVAC, were and still are ridiculed in Company-lines. Most egregiously; for someone allegedly embedded with an actual EOD-team in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow seems to understand little to nothing about what EOD technicians actually do and where they fit within the greater military scheme of things.
But how important are these technical details, really? Saving Private Ryan for all of its realism is guilty of a by-the-numbers Spielbergian plot almost hackneyed in its simplicity. The concept of an officer and several enlisted men pulled out of a Rifle Company during the Invasion of Normandy to find and pull some unlucky Private out of the madness of war is absurd. Apocalypse Now makes a better acid-trip than it does a mission, and Full Metal Jacket is a Kubrickian series of complex symbology sauteed in the Vietnam War. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, one of the most famous cinematic portrayals of Vietnam, ladles out some pretty soupy melodrama courtesy of Willem Defoe. And yet, for all their warts and boils, these films sit atop the pedestal of war cinema among critics and military minds alike.
What was the deciding factor? The message? The anti-war undertones? The satire?
For all its failings, The Hurt Locker covers a unique angle in cinematic war narration that has gained little coverage in Hollywood. The underlying theme of combat-addiction, by contemporary nomenclature, or the notion that some actually enjoy combat and participating in wars, is rarely explored and certainly overlooked in the media. It is a brave direction to take in this day and age, where in the wake of the Vietnam War the cultural respect for martial prowess had been replaced with social mourning, and condemnation. Today, soldiers go to Afghanistan, or Iraq, and in our popular mindset they are still fighting the war in Vietnam and surrounded by the same outdated controversies. The tragedy of The Hurt Locker ultimately is its inability to string together the powerful scenes which convey this message midst the movie's narrative wreckage.
In the ending sequence of the movie, for instance, we are jarred out of the Iraqi war-zone without warning and dropped into an average American grocery-store. Jerry Renner's character is back home. We are jarred out of the war the same way soldiers are jarred out of the war - without proper decompression, or travel-time - and instead of facing the indifferent faces of Iraqi civilians and threatened by open window-panes we are facing miles and miles of cereal boxes, brand-name product, the meaninglessness of choice, modern life, and overwhelmed by it. The structure, the simplicity, the self-validation is all gone. As John Rambo states in his final soliloquy from the 1982 First Blood, "Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!". The notion that is is not merely the trauma experienced in war-fighting environments that cause mental disorders, but the mediocrity of the modern civilian world is a refreshing one to explore. There is boundless territory here to explore the shifting cultural perspective towards war in modern society, down to the shift-worker mentality by which our soldiers are deployed overseas versus the traditional campaign. When Renner steps off the transport in the final scene to join Delta Company, he wears a smile on his face. He's home. There's a moment of multi-dimensional characterization when he honestly admits to his infant son that he doesn't feel any real love for him at all.
Unfortunately the thematic depth that could be cultivated from this is wasted on Bigelow's direction. Instead of spending time developing the cast, we are treated to a Hollywoodized portrayal of a modern warzone. Disposing of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other Un-Exploded Ordnances (UXOs) on a routine basis does not pack enough tension for The Hurt Locker - these EOD technicians must also engage in sniper-to-sniper combat, run free through the streets of Baghdad like criminals, spend the entire movie operating independent of any parent organization like some fantasy Special-Forces team, and get drunk and punch each other in a Paleolithic example of male-bonding. What these farcical plot developments commit is twofold - foremost, it is absolutely disrespectful to anybody who has served operationally to suggest that their job isn't interesting enough on its own merit to revolve a story around, and secondly, it shows more ambition than sense. The film itself can be taken as a poetic statement of our modern dissociation with the realities of war - even The Empire Strikes Back managed to get the details of a proper military defensive position correct and that was a science-fiction/fantasy epic.
What separates Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan from The Hurt Locker is that the plot is true to the source material. Both films take the audience on a tour of the Vietnam War and the Invasion of Normandy respectively - and thus, the narrative is built around this. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard commands a lone Patrol Boat on an independent mission and acts as our Virgil into the dark heart of the Vietnam War. All the disconnected scenes of madness and chaos make narrative sense because for all intents and purposes it is supposed to be the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Saving Private Ryan pushes us out of the Higgins Boat into the bloody mayhem of the Omaha Beach landing and then, scene-by-scene, we are whisked up the Yellow Brick Road to Ramelle, and Ryan, and the Alamo. In both these movies the war in question is the backdrop for the narrative - either movie could have easily taken place during the Trojan War, or the Peloponnesian. These movies are not written for soldiers, they are written for audiences, and the plot is conveyed to us as if we are tourists (which we are).
The Hurt Locker should have been made about an embedded or freelance Combat Journalist, a character who bounced unit-to-unit and whose story explored the Iraq War piece-by-piece. If you are just determined to have action sequences, make the film about Combat Engineers or Assault Pioneers. When dealing strictly with the lives and experiences of your characters, authenticity reigns - the 2008 HBO series Generation Kill reproduced the 2003 Invasion of Iraq down to the ornamentation on the Marine First Recon Humvees. It unashamedly shows off the modern Marine Corps sub-culture at war and allows us to interpret it as we see fit. Platoon is a morality tale set within a dismounted infantry platoon in Vietnam. The routine, the exhaustion, the formations, the weapons, the slang, the juxtaposition of mundanity and fear, all are so accurate that they smoothen out the narrative - characters stumble and slip in the mud, cigarettes take multiple attempts to light, and actual South Vietnamese Safe Conduct Passes are stapled to the mutilated corpses of American soldiers. When the environment your characters live in is authentic, their performances becomes authentic, and your message becomes authentic. The Hurt Locker, for all the power and good of its message, fails to authenticate that message with technical knowledge and it ends up falling flat.
The final nail in The Hurt Locker's coffin is its absence of humanity. While Jeremy Renner's Staff-Sergeant William James shows sporadic moments of depth, he still ends up being a flat character (which is a far cry above his entourage, who show about as much depth as gasoline puddles in a supermarket parking lot). During his final scene in Iraq, James claims he "[doesn't] know" why he is the way he is - why combat and war does not shake him as much as it does his team-members. The Hurt Locker does not even make inferences as to why James feels this way - this coupled with the ending sequence makes James out to be some sort of alien or sociopath incapable of "normal" human emotions. This is a disgraceful notion because there are legitimate (and aforementioned) reasons why he may enjoy his job so much. This popular idea that war is absolutely terrible and that everyone who returns from its is fundamentally changed for the worst (or that those who excel at it are somehow broken) is juvenile and insulting. Incidentally, James' flatness conveys more about the audience than it does about the characters - our cultural misunderstanding of war and war-fighting are reflected in James' smile at the end of the movie.
This lack of humanity is compounded by other supporting characters - Specialist Eldridge's fatalism becomes so melodramatic it becomes unrealistic and borders on being satirical. Eldridge himself becomes a smaller symbol of this cultural disconnect by proxy - he is less a soldier at war than someone imagining himself to be a soldier at war, and is unconvincing.
There is no light-heartedness either, nothing about these characters that makes you smile. For the most part they merely crack wise, or moan and complain. There are no "Tracks of My Tears" moments, or "Field Fucks", or running in serpentine patterns, that truly convey the absurdity of war and mankind's ability to cope with it. In Jarhead, Swofford's ability to make us laugh made his psychological transformation under the external pressures of a combat deployment all the more shocking. At the end of the day, Bigelow is telling us how to think instead showing and letting us decide, and leaves herself and The Hurt Locker open to rejection.
