OK, there’s no actual surfing insurgents in The Hurt Locker but director Kathryn Bigelow’s masterpiece of action and bromance, Point Break, certainly sprang to mind whilst watching her latest effort. Here too we find a love/hate relationship between two diametrically opposed alphas – one playing by the rules, the other pissing on the book. Jeremy Renner, previously unknown to me, creates a complex and nuanced character in his role as the maverick US bomb diffusal officer in Iraq, at odds with his straight laced partner. And the character is revealed mainly through action, not through dialogue and backstory. The action/suspense sequences come thick and fast. This female director knows what makes guys tick. An artists gender really shouldn’t affect how you think of the work but the fact that Bigelow is the only female making action movies in Hollywood today really does make you sit up and shout ‘You go, girl!’, especially as she’s doing it better than any of the boys right now. She understands what Michael Bay and McG seem unable to grasp – we don’t give a toss about the explosions unless we care about the people getting blowed up, duh. And The Hurt Locker really does make us care about the people in the firing line.
Bigelow has previously exclaimed her love for ‘heightened emotional states’ in movies and so the setup here seems like a dream project – what cold be more emotionally heightened than a team of guys trying to diffuse bombs in a warzone whilst having a personal conflict amongst themselves as well? She loves men too. She clearly is fascinated by the complex dynamic of the bromance, finding the latent femininity in the bravado of the most macho. It’s a shame things didn’t work out between her and former husband James Cameron, who seemed like her perfect mirror match – a male action movie director who found the kick ass warrior lurking in the Mother (Aliens, Terminator 1 & 2 etc). For me, one of the most tantalising what-if prospects of recent years is imagining what Terminator Salvation would have been like if directed by Bigelow!
This film basically consists of a series of unconnected suspense sequences that may or may not end with a kaboom, making for an episodic journey that feels quite random and sketchy. I guess that was a conscious choice, a way of reflecting the ‘reality’ of the Iraq situation the soldiers face and it works as far as it goes but is ultimately unsatisfying. The ending left me cold, especially the cheesy last shot but then I’ve never been much of a fan of circular narratives. Earlier scenes recalled Full Metal Jacket in terms of the black humour and disjointed pacing but that film had a very specific target in it’s sights that Kubrick lined up and hit without the audience even realising. Things are alot more fuzzy here. There seems to be some stylistic conflict going on. I think Bigelow makes great movies but here she wanted to make a FILM. So we get the Iraq setting (sans polemics and finger pointing thankfully, there’s good and bad on both sides here) and the verite’ implication of the Shaky-Cam, which feels at odds with the movie-movie suspense and occasional cinematic flourishes like slow motion cartridges cart-wheeling in the dust. One of the last shots in the movie abandons the Shaky-Cam for a tripod and a nicely composed, static frame. And boy, it made me wish the whole film had been shot like this, I think it would even have heightened the suspense. The faux realism of handheld camera work feels just as contrived now as whatever it was cats were trying to break free of when they first kicked over their tripods. Mercifully, Bigelow still knows how to delineate screen space in an action scene and the camera work never veers into nausea-inducing territory.
Whilst the ending dampened my enthusiasm for the movie, theres still alot to appreciate here from the seriously tense bomb scenes to the infectious male bonding of the barracks scenes. The most impressive aspect is perhaps the unnervingly realistic recreation of Iraqi streets that act as both hub of city life and treacherous warzone. All in, this is the least dry ‘Iraq War Film’ yet and for that it should be commended.
No, not a scene from the film but rather, what happens when you have a soft drink malfunction.
Tags: James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow
[...] Too much shaky cam but still pulls off many a tense set piece of bomb disposal and the whole thing just feels hella authentic. Review here. [...]