The Hurt Locker

Gritty wartime realism. Set in Iraq, present day, the film follows a bomb
disposal squad going about their daily business of dealing with unimaginable
peril, and trying to deal with their new squad leader, who appears to be a
chronic risk-taking adrenaline junkie.

It's essentially a film about American soldiers being put in harm's way, in
constant risk of death from all sides, and how that unimaginable stress is
dealt with, when even a local with a mobile phone is a potential threat, and
every bag of rubbish in the street is a potential landmine. The answer seems to
be that you either crack up, or you go crazy.

There isn't so much a story as a series of events. Each day, the team's called
out to deal with a situation, and they go and they deal with it. And we get to
see a fresh horror of war each time. There are some unbelievably tense scenes,
made more tense by the film's apparent willingness to kill off the characters.
God alone knows what it must be like to actually defuse an improvised
explosive, if watching an actor defuse a fake one is that tense.

I don't think that the film has more to say about war than earlier efforts like
Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now, but it's a worthy successor to that sort
of film. If I have a criticism, it's that it does seem, a bit, to be pro-US
propoganda. Iraqi insurgents are seen in a very bad light, where they are seen
at all, and very little is made of the politics of the situation. We don't
really get to question whether or not the US has any business being there. As
far as the soldiers are concerned, they're there because those are the orders,
and that appears to be sufficient justification. But then, the film isn't
about that.

Still, and interesting film, with a very interesting ending. If you can even
call it an ending.