The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker depicts a macho bomb disposal squad in Iraq. The film was set in Iraq but filmed over the border in Jordan. A dramatic action movie firmly focused on the side of the soldiers located in Baghdad. The military cannot engage the enemy in any meaningful sense. Long series of patrols of heavily armoured moving targets shift through dangerous roadside bombs hidden in the dry desert rubble, - triggered booby-traps.

The title Hurt Locker refers to the physical trauma of being close to the deafening blast of an explosion. The noise is just as bad as the strange silence that’s packed you in a tight box of intense pain. Bigelow is a female director and a great film maker. Her work is remarkable in that the focus is on the muscular movie action genre, the kind of films with big guns, expansive scenes, dominant themes and sweeping camera movements. True, Hurt Locker is a new film about men and war and nobody enjoys war. It centres on a three-man bomb disposal squad that sifts through the sand disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival 2008 and was greeted with applause, acclaim and some sort of misunderstanding. Bigelow though is an extraordinary outsider when film making, as she manages to show the maddening addiction to war as well as the horrors. One critic suggests that although the film was well shot, and cleverly acted and carefully cut it can easily pass for propaganda. Also some say this is not anti-war it’s ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘prescriptive’. It is an analysis of how men get hooked on the experience of war, how their task can badly affect them and how it can even destroy the mind. Bigelow studied painting at the Art Institute San Francisco and later on attended the Whitney Museums Independent Study Programme, she also studied with Susan Sonntag. Breakthrough films include Near Dark, 1987, a vampire movie and later there’s the sci-fi future shocker starring Ralph Fiennes, called Strange Days, 1995, produced by her husband, James Cameron. There was also an unnerving study of men and machine power in the thriller called K19: The Widow-maker about the first Soviet nuclear submarine.