As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally published on August 14, 2009 on the blog Marxist Update.
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“The great ignored question raised by events depicted in The Hurt Locker is simple: who makes the IEDs, and why? The bombs materialize and must be disarmed. A “hadji” with a cell phone may lurk among onlookers, ready to detonate the device, but we are given nothing but a sea of Iraqi faces to confront.”
by Jay Rothermel
The Hurt Locker is marketed as 2009’s Best Picture. Limited release and a blockbuster media campaign are creating an atmosphere of inevitability: This is the movie we must all see. Reviewers love a serious (i.e., responsible and “non-partisan”) war movie they can bloviate about, patting themselves and the movie’s producers on the back for tackling the Big Issues. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will take its own turn at the job in March 2010.
Producer-Director Kathryn Bigelow’s movie tells the story of a squad of U.S. Army specialists who disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Baghdad. When the movie begins and Staff Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) joins the squad, they have 38 days to serve before the end of their one year rotation. Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are the other members of the squad.
Kathryn Bigelow has a reputation for introducing a little panache into her movies, so expectations for a combat movie like “The Hurt Locker” are high. In Near Dark (1987) she gave us some mercifully anti-Anne Rice vampires in the desert southwest. Blue Steel (1989) gave viewers the vicarious thrill of a bad end for notoriously hammy actor Ron Silver. Point Break (1991) was a surfing recapitulation of White Heat. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) took the submarine genre to perversely quixotic heights.
The Hollywood combat movie is a genre notorious for hoary clichés. We all know them: at least one solider is on the verge of going home. Another loves war a little too much. A third, from the rear echelon, wants to see some real action. Around camp a G.I. might befriend a local boy, a Samuel Fuller war orphan with a name like Short Round. If Fuller or Robert Aldrich made the movie, most of the officers would be useless tyros or dangerous martinets. The Black soldier would come off hard-as-nails, but reveal himself late in the movie as the heart of the unit. The youngest baby-faced grunt would have a meltdown. There would be some lighter escapades, too, to break-up the bigger combat scenes: men carousing and “getting down” to the soundtrack’s rock and roll music.
The Hurt Locker is sold as a vigorously up-to-date hand-held no-stars kitchen-sink realist combat movie with none of these trite and ancient plot points. On this the TV commercials, stellar reviews, and print ads all agree. But the movie has them. Indeed, it seems like an encyclopedia of such clichés. So many are used that the viewer starts to feel like the victim of a practical joke, lured to the theater with the old bait-and-switch.
The clichés would not be such a bitter surprise if The Hurt Locker worked a little harder to disguise them. The much-touted scenes of Staff Sergeant James actually defusing IEDs take up only about 15 minutes of screen time, and are tossed-off with little respect for viewer interest in the work. James digs around the bombs, grapples with them, and pulls them apart as he tries to best their makers, but he might as well be changing a flat tire. We are not given any information on how these devices are created, or the nuts and bolts of how they work. Even the old UK TV show Danger: UXB did viewers that courtesy.
Much is made of G.I. hardships in The Hurt Locker. Their days are a kinetic nightmare of uncertainty. Iraqis they interact with are all referred to as “hadjis,” whose next cell phone call might detonate a bomb. Drunkenness, video games, and writhing in self-pity fill the non-working hours. The only thing more grinding and disturbing than service in Iraq is life at home upon return. Spouses just don’t understand. After a trip to a grocery store, Staff Sergeant James finds he cannot wait to volunteer for another tour.
A Caricature of an Important Film
The Hurt Locker begins with a quotation from journalist Chris Hedges to the effect that “war is an addiction.” Deciding whether this is the height of disingenuousness or the actual low level of liberal political insight of the movie’s producers must be left to each viewer. Perhaps it was a choice between the Hedges quote and George W. Bush on U.S. consumer addiction to “foreign oil.”
The Hurt Locker wants to unite compelling story and compelling story-telling. Contention with a movie like The Wages of Fear (1953), dramatizing the perils and costs of going to work, was not out of the question. But Bigelow surrenders early and often to episodes that ape verisimilitude but kill momentum. One endless chunk of the movie, where our squad and a group of sociable Blackwater-style contractors are pinned-down by a sniper, defuses most hard-won early tension and offers no better insights than the scenes following it.
The great ignored question raised by events depicted in The Hurt Locker is simple: who makes the IEDs, and why? The bombs materialize and must be disarmed. A “hadji” with a cell phone may lurk among onlookers, ready to detonate the device, but we are given nothing but a sea of Iraqi faces to confront. Even a movie like The Kingdom (2007) had the courtesy to sketch a rationale for its bombers. Bigelow’s movie flies from such questions out of weakness, not strength. Such dishonesty, even more than dramaturgical laziness, sinks the enterprise.
“Bigelow’s movie flies from such questions out of weakness, not strength. Such dishonesty, even more than dramaturgical laziness, sinks the enterprise.”
I dunno, Coppola didn’t really tell us anything about the vietcong in Apocalypse Now for it to be lauded as the ultimate vietnam movie, doesn’t Bigelow’s film just follow in that same tradition?
I was thinking of seeing this film, but maybe I won’t now!
Plum
Don’t Be a Plum
My thanks to blfj-after dark for re-posting the review. It originally appeared at Kasama back in August: http://kasamaproject.org/2009/08/14/review-the-hurt-locker/
Kasama during the summer had a rollicking discussion of “great communist movies (and movies communists like anyway)”: http://kasamaproject.org/2009/07/16/our-favorite-communist-films/
Another Marxist analysis of the Oscars appears here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/acad-m09.shtml
WSWS has a solid history of Marxist movie reviewing and shines a light on international film festivals of note, too.
Jay
This is very on-the-money, I think. It’s refreshing to read. I saw this film immediately after reading the NY Times review. I practically banged my shin into a desk rushing to get to theater after reading the praise.
I liked it, kinda. Certainly well-crafted–but I felt is was very cliché-heavy. It was one set-piece over and over. And over.
And, yes, it’s unavoidable that after a while, you’d want more background on the enemy. It’s a totally fair reaction for any viewer–yet it was surprising to see how many people skipped over that detail.
Thanks for the post!
“The great ignored question raised by events depicted in The Hurt Locker is simple: who makes the IEDs, and why? The bombs materialize and must be disarmed”
That’s a legitimate aesthetic decision. It forces us to share the point of view of the soldiers who cannot tell friend from enemy, and who are unable to understand either. One of the film’s great strengths is its sense of immediacy, experiencing things in the moment through the eyes of the characters.
However, the answer to the “why” is self-evident — the bombmakers want the occupiers out of their country.
I don’t need to know the “nuts and bolts” about how an IED works in this film anymore than I need to know how an automobile engine works when I watch a car-racing movie. I’m more interested in what makes the characters tick. So was Bigelow.
With respect to characters, the film starts with identifiable stereotypes – just as Fuller & Siegel did (not to mention someone like Hawks who practically revels in his stereotypes), but those basic types are modified and occasionally subverted over the course of the film. See, e.g., the Iraqui kid character “Beckham” who at first seems like he walked straight out of one of Fuller’s war films, and the evolution of Sgt. James’ attitude toward that character. At first (spoiler alert?), James befriends him; then he becomes frantically obsessed with the boy after he thinks he has been killed (significantly, he can’t tell one Iraqui boy from another); and finally, when Beckham shows up again alive, James is offended, he wants nothing more to do with him – not the usual sentimental (or tragic!) outcome for a setup of this type.
The encounter with the mercenaries is anything but a cliche. How many other war films have we seen where American soldiers had to work side by side with mercenaries?
I certainly wouldn’t complain about the set pieces – some of them are comparable to the best of De Palma.
Sure the film has its weaknesses – what film doesn’t? – but, all things considered – including the competition – it was a worthy Best Picture choice.
“A caricature of an important film”
Completely right. It’s a sop. War is bad. War is addictive. Isn’t it tough? A whole string of politically correct cliches in a film that is repetitious and boring.
I don’t think we need a ‘rationale’ for the bombers. This is from the Americans’ P.O.V. and it is not for this unit to discuss why or how but simply to disarm bombs and save lives. She isn’t writing an essay, though at times it might feel like it.
Wow!!! I just watched the movie. For free on http://famedmovies.com/ . Great portrayal of what our soldiers go through, very moving and realistic, it made me feel like I was there in their unit, living it with them. Great director, I think she deserved the award. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there are so many spiteful comments about the war. I don’t like the war, but I think it was necessary. We don’t know all that goes on in the field, many of you talk as experts in wars and fighting terrorism.
I enjoyed it, but it seemed more like an extended drama then an actual movie. I guess its meant to be informative rather then entertaining though, bearing in mind that all this crap is actually going on in Iraq and Afghanistan every day
Kathryn Bigelow who is the director of the Hurt Locker is the ex wife of James Cameron who directed Avatar. Oh and don’t think that Cameron taught her, because she is quite an accomplished director in her own right
Wow most people commenting on this video are just people that have played mw2. I have shot almost every military gun that is available, the barrette is a very strong, accurate gun. Could that shot with the man running be done in real life? Yes it can, but the chances are very slim. You have to think, these men are in full uniform in 100+ degrees weather, they are running, and they are very nervous. This movie was one of the best war movies I have seen in a long time.
Those are artillery shells that were connected to wires with blasting caps attached to the ends. Then the wires are attached to a radio, cell phone, transmitter, etc. When the object receives a transmission (ie., phone call, radio transmission) it sends an electrical charge to the blasting caps, thus, causing the explosion. SEMPER FI!