Put the Hurt On

This week, the movie The Hurt Locker arrived on DVD, and I decided I ought to check it out. It's nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Drama. It's also widely expected to receive an Oscar nomination -- and with 10 nominees for Best Picture this year, I figure I'd better start watching now if I'm even going to come close to seeing all of them.

It's a drama about the current Iraq War, following an army E.O.D. team -- that's soldiers who disable explosive devices. And it's also portrayed in a very stark and realistic way, just this side of documentary.

This new perspective from which to tell a war story is fairly novel, and so I found it more compelling than the average war movie. It focuses on a small number of characters, also more interesting than the average war movie. In particular, the lead is just the kind of crazy you'd expect of someone who enjoys disarming bombs for a living, and it's a good character portrait.

The acting is fantastic in the movie. Jeremy Renner, who few of you will likely know, stars as that crazy-skilled bomb technician I mentioned. The major characters are all lesser-known actors that do very good work, but the film is also peppered with several small performances by more recognizable actors. Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Guy Pearce, and Evangeline Lilly all make appearances, mostly for just a short scene of a couple minutes each -- but each makes a strong impact in the movie.

What dulls my enthusiasm for The Hurt Locker a bit, though, is that the movie doesn't have much of an overall story to tell. It depicts this life, this environment, in a thorough way. It presents a number of very tense and engaging sequences. But it also plays out almost like an anthology movie. There are about six or seven "episodes" or short stories in the film, connected in that they involve the same characters, but also almost disconnected from each other. They add up to set a tone, but not necessarily to tell a narrative.

So while it's not gonna crack my personal top 10 from last year, I do agree it's one of the better war movies to come around in a while. I rate it a B-.