In light of recent awards, a review of 'The Hurt Locker', and bravo Kathryn.

One’s primary motivation for wanting so badly to watch The Hurt Locker was because it won an Oscar not too long ago, and because a woman has finally broken the mould to win the night’s most coveted prize. And also, I was getting to watch it at one of the University’s film festivals, which become all too ubiquitous when the first traces of election season are in the winds.

And then one was pleasantly taken by the cinematic experience itself. There is no short answer to the question ‘How was the movie?’, except this – it is an exquisite piece of filmmaking that deals with some great artistic paradoxes. How do you make a philosophical film, and keep it real, so it is not whimsical? How do you keep all the light heartedness of real life, and portray also, all the hell that life can be? How do you make something that is both serious and witty without being insensitive? Kathryn Bigelow is able to do all three things with finesse, and make a gripping war movie while she’s at it.

On the surface, ‘The Hurt Locker’ is about the theatre of war, and a few actors. What its really about, is reality. That is the one thing that will strike you – the complete lack of pretence. There is heroism, but behind the hero, there is a real everyday individual, without the melodrama of a superhero’s alter ego ordinaire. It’s a war movie, but the question of patriotism never comes up. The individual is always at the heart of the narrative. The mundane details of daily life blend easily with the terror and turmoil of war at its worst. The story in itself is not your mainstream, streamlined, ‘point A to point B’ plot line. Neither is it a complex labyrinth or a series of episodes. It’s something else entirely. It’s what real life is. 

This is not Hollywood style war, which inexplicably seems to reduce itself to dense smoke, shrapnel, and a carefully placed romance with all the effect of a Greek tragedy. Neither is it the typical Indie anti-war film with grand rhetoric about neo-imperialism. The Hurt Locker has all the artistic value of a candid photograph - the wedding ring among bomb parts and what follows it, the Iraqi man on his knees, begging to be saved, Beckham - the dvd boy, the supermarket shelves, the blood stained bullet, the work of a bomb diffuser, and one is in the midst of it all, without the dense background music of a thriller, but with a more real, grotesque sort of panic that affects the audience. 

One appreciates the honesty of it all. And when a movie is about American soldiers in Iraq, and its characters speak a language one completely comprehends even in a context far removed, one could say that one has watched a very successful film indeed.