The Hurt Locker [movie]

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days), the Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines. It’s an experiential war movie, but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier’s psyche. The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow’s work devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities and the men who emerge as their leaders. Staff Sergeant William James (the brilliant Jeremy Renner) is one such character—a secular god with a penchant for reckless bravado who inspires equal amounts of envy and contempt in the men under his command. Some have heralded Bigelow’s film as an “apolitical” war movie, which is really a way of saying that it arrives mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment—something Bigelow does as well as any director at work today.

I just saw it here in nashville an hour ago...10:30 showing with my 10 year old lad

not one ounce of politics

simply a very good war movie

really well done.....amazing

He loves the military, is extremely patriotic and has a great grasp of what is at stake in the war with much of Islam....and he is very mature for his age..when he is with adults

and on top of that he knows several Iraq war vets from Ft Campbell who have visited and stayed at our home and his own family has a rich military tradition (not me) going back to before the WBTS in the South.

I had studied the movie on that libfest but comprehensive site IMDB and we had been waiting months for it to finally come out...and we were not disappointed.

he can smell PC indoctrination a mile away and gives his teachers fits so he and I were quite pleased that it was anything but that

the only part I had him close his eyes was the dead kid part...gruesome no doubt and when it unfolded he knew already...like a horror movie sorta but of course not fake

i myself was always disturbed by the dead children from my forays into conflict zones....God, with so many of my own now I don't think i could handle it...that is easier for young men without children yet..maybe

anyhow...you should see it...Ralph Fiennes sorta steals the show briefly...very dry and witty

i have other children I would not and did not take and this was probably the maximum effect I would expose him to yet

but the message he got was I think very positive and informing...this was real with no polemics...

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