"There are no Iraqi characters to speak of, but the walk-ons and extras behave, with one or two exceptions, exactly as their real counterparts would-that is, they treat the Americans with wary hostility, ingratiation, or bafflement. As for the Americans, they commit no acts of extraordinary self-sacrifice or criminal thuggery. As bomb-disposal experts, they are in the business of saving people's lives, but they do it with enough juiced-up aggression that there's no risk of sentimentality. Perhaps because the Americans' job involves defusing rather than inciting violence, they are allowed to have the realistic and fairly complex reactions to Iraqis that previous movies denied them-that is, a mixture of wary hostility, ingratiation, and bafflement." Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer reviews "The Hurt Locker"
The Hurt Locker
from Interesting Times by George Packer
I didn't particularly want to go see "The Hurt Locker," because every other Iraq war movie I've seen managed to portray American soldiers as psychopaths in a crude, politically overdetermined video game, with the same hand-held camera tricks and heavy-metal score creating a nauseating sense of randomness and meaninglessness. But "The Hurt Locker" turned out to be the first good movie about the war I've seen.
It follows three members of a U.S. Army bomb-disposal squad in Baghdad as they sweat their way into and out of one terrifying mission after another, involving piles of trash, wired explosives, detonators, suspicious-looking bystanders, and a lot of shouting through headsets. The team leader, whose predecessor is blown up in the first scene, is the reckless, adrenaline-addicted, enormously charming Staff Sergeant Will James; his appalled sidekicks, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge, are just trying to get through their tours quite literally in one piece. The movie is little more than one heart-pounding set piece after another, held together by the thinnest of plots, and shot with the same shaky camerawork as the other Iraq movies, which always seems a cheesy distortion of the real effect of danger and fear, which is to sharpen and concentrate one's vision. And yet this movie's focus, surprisingly, becomes the interplay among the three men, which is constantly changing and deepening. This is an action film with distinctly drawn characters, rendered convincingly by three unknowns. The themes-war's attractive and destructive power; the thin line between comradeship and antagonism; the foot soldier's very narrow, very intense view-are not particular to Iraq, but universal.
"The Hurt Locker" was filmed in Amman, whose streets, in spite of the filmmakers' efforts to simulate Iraq's rubble and crippled, half-starved cats, will strike anyone familiar with Baghdad as a little too spiffy. There are no Iraqi characters to speak of, but the walk-ons and extras behave, with one or two exceptions, exactly as their real counterparts would-that is, they treat the Americans with wary hostility, ingratiation, or bafflement. As for the Americans, they commit no acts of extraordinary self-sacrifice or criminal thuggery. As bomb-disposal experts, they are in the business of saving people's lives, but they do it with enough juiced-up aggression that there's no risk of sentimentality. Perhaps because the Americans' job involves defusing rather than inciting violence, they are allowed to have the realistic and fairly complex reactions to Iraqis that previous movies denied them-that is, a mixture of wary hostility, ingratiation, and bafflement.
Above all, this is an Iraq movie with a modest agenda and no obvious political views. That, more than anything else, is the source of its strength. Because the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow, is a veteran action-movie director, and her purpose is entertainment and character development, the Iraq war portrayed here is allowed to be a war, not a blank screen for the grandiose projections of a self-important auteur (like Brian De Palma, who announced that his intention in making his pretentious snuff film "Redacted" was to force the public to end the war). "The Hurt Locker" isn't an Iraq movie-it's a war movie, assuming its place in the long trail of that good-bad genre going back to John Wayne and Ernie Pyle.
Perhaps, with the departure of the Bush Administration, the withdrawal of American combat units from Iraqi cities, the attention of the new President shifted to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, and the public worried about jobs and houses, Iraq can start to become a real war, not a symbol of all-consuming evil-the subject of movies that try to be good movies rather than major statements. And perhaps audiences will want to see them.
