Two of the things I hate most are when movie makers combine weak stories with confusing messages. It's almost like filmmakers these days focus more on the craft of film making and less on story or thinking about the message they are sending. THL is an impressive movie on a lot of levels, but what the fuck are they trying to say? Is it a pro-war film? Is it an anti-war film? I'm not a fan of being spoon fed what the message of a movie is - which the film tries to do in it's very intro - but then the rest of the movie breaks down in delivery of that primary premise and then dives deeply into "What the Fuck" territory faster than a french nihilist on ecstasy.
The main theme of the movie is "War is a drug." They had to say it right up front or else you'd be wondering what the fuck you spent two hours of your life doing. But the theme is never visited in the first two acts, and by the time it comes back around, you've already forgotten that tiny bit you've read at the beginning and what you really want is a Superman movie. As you watch these characters descend into the madness of the war-drug, you wonder - am I supposed to like war? or hate war? or hate war and like warriors? or like war and hate warriors? or hate warriors warring? or hate warriors not warring? The signals are just not clear enough to decide that any of the dozen or so messages this movie is trying to send are actually the right one. Bigelow becomes a big cock tease promising action and adventure but ultimately telling us "No, you can't enjoy that. Now, go feel guilty by watching some really fucked up personal drama."
The movie begins with Guy Pierce in Iraq getting blown up by a roadside bomb he's trying to disarm. It's an impressing and disturbing scene where great care is taken to present a sense of realism that sets the stage for the nervousness and anxiety of every scene thereafter. You can almost see the eyeballs in the red squishy goo that fills Pierce's helmet as he makes a futile attempt to run away from an exploding bomb. After Pierce's untimely demise, an opening is left on the bomb disposal team. A role that Jeremy Renner soon fills.
The next few sequences build on the bomb disposal theme. You create a bond with these characters as they survive more and more anxiety laden situations, with an increasing array of difficult and complex traps thrown at them. Given the intro sequence, you're convinced that one of them is going to be splattered all over the desert by one of these monstrous bombs, if they don't kill each other first. There's a great deal of drama, and some huge highs of tension and release - and Bigelow does a great job of pulling every ounce of stress out of the performances through the camera work and direction.
It's only once you've gotten past all of the bomb disposal scenes, and as the team begins to gel, the movie itself starts to fall apart. Renner's character, after carrying his team through some precarious missions, starts to detach from reality. The switch is so sudden it makes you wonder if somehow you weren't slipped a roofie and woke up in someone else's apartment watching a different movie. And then it becomes painfully apparent. The main theme of the movie has been suspiciously missing for the past hour. You're not watching a superhero movie at all, you're watching a movie about the human psyche - like the writers were all of the sudden guilty of enjoying the sense of bravado and daring they'd created just a bit too deeply and had to castrate themselves for being overly self-satisfied with the explosive bomb sequences. The clues come early as the exciting scenes are tied together with characters having random drunken bouts of homoerotic self flagellation, but largely go ignored because we're all too busy wondering who's going to be atomized into a fine meat spray. But then you land in the third act of the film which tries to tell you what sick bastards everyone is and how they are all war mongering adrenaline junkies who can plunder, murder, and kill with impunity. So pardon me if I'm a little confused.
It's apparently not enough that you work your way through this much of the movie sitting on the edge of your seat to see which of the gruesome bombs is going blow everything to smithereens, but then to spend all that time building sympathy and interest in characters just to have it all taken away as they regress into sniveling mounds of blubbery flesh who can no longer make remotely good decisions about life - in a warzone or not. The problem is, any criticism I give of the movie and it's story or characters comes close to sounding like criticism of the men and women for whom this movie is a snippet of representation. It's obvious that war is troubling, and there are hundreds of movies who depict that with great clarity, the effect it has on the individuals that endure it has been subject of every war film since the Viet Nam era. It's also obvious war is material and backdrop for life and death drama. But The Hurt Locker doesn't do any of this. It doesn't chose a side. Should it be titilating and draw you into the life and death drama? If it does that, then it's just glorifying war and comes off as a propaganda film. Should it be gut wrenching and personal? If it does that, it winds up belittling the heroic effort of the men and women who's duty it is to be fighting. In the end it tries to walk the line between John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima" and Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and instead of doing either particularly well, it just winds up feeling stilted and irritating - like finding out the actress you've just taken home and been snogging for the past hour is really a confused man in a dress who feels guilty that he may have ruined his marriage by sleeping with you.
Instead of trying to give our moral compasses a jump start, if it had only focused on telling a good story, The Hurt Locker would have been a better film. The drama was raw, and compelling. The characters and performances were great. Even the shaky camera was okay, since it never got in the way of the action, and always portrayed a sense of realism that really takes this movie to another level. Unfortunately The Hurt Locker does not live up to that promise, and falls flat through it's inability to be something more than a morality play without a clear message. Which is just fucking annoying.
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