The Hurt Locker

Released: June 26, 2009

Studio: Voltage Pictures, First Light, Kingsgate Films, Summit Entertainment

Genre: war drama

Box Office (numbers in millions):

Domestic: 17.02 Worldwide: 49.26

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: -- Worldwide: --

Directing: Kathryn Bigelow

Screenwriting: Mark Boal

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Guy Pearce

Review:

The Hurt Locker is a war drama set during the second year of the Iraq War. The story follows an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who try to destroy an explosive device, but “are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat.” ^WK The screenwriter, Mark Boal, drew on his own experience as a war journalist. The term “hurt locker” “basically means Shell Shock 2.0. It refers to the physical trauma of being in close proximity, time after time, to the deafening blast of an explosion, controlled or otherwise.” ^GN

Conflict develops between Staff Sergeant William James (Renner) and Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Mackie), who is disturbed by “James’s redneck recklessness.” ^GN The third member of their squad is Owen Eldridge (Geraghty), a “young soldier, visibly unravelling.” ^GN James’s behavior forces the viewer to ask if he is “becoming unhinged, driven over the edge” ^GN or “that the danger of war is deeply exciting and James wants to mainline it directly into his vein?” ^GN

Director Kathryn Bigelow focuses on “a single location – Baghdad – and wants to find out what is going on inside the US combatants’ hearts and minds.” ^GN She “adroitly shows how Sanborn and Eldridge resent and yet sympathize with their gung-ho commanding officer. They are scared by him, and yet they are excited and even inspired by him.” ^GN

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw praised the film as “the best and most insightful anti-war film about Iraq.” ^GN “Debating the purpose and origins of the conflict is not the point.” ^GN “The Hurt Locker is about the long, painful endgame in Iraq, the asymmetric nightmare in which the military cannot engage the enemy in any meaningful sense.” ^GN