Editor’s note: Welcome to the thirty-second of a 33-part series dissecting the 82st Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every day leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category of the Oscars. To read any other posts regarding this event, please click the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

By Nathan Bartlebaugh of Cinematropolis.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has gone further than many ever expected it to go.

Opening last summer as a dubious war flick in a time that has seen far too many of them, it seemed destined to open and then disappear. But, it didn’t. It stayed, and stayed and stayed. Now, Bigelow, one of a few female directors ever nominated for Best Director, is going to the Academy Awards with his ‘action-film-that-could’ and a terrific bit of added irony, will go to head-to-head with ex-husband James Cameron for the best picture crown. If she wins, she will be the first woman to take home the honor. And me, I think she has a really good shot of winning it too.

I first saw The Hurt Locker last summer when it played as the closing night event of the Maryland Film Festival, and afterwards Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal sat down for a live-audience interview with Ann Hornaday. At the time, I experienced the film as a purely visceral experience; it was in the context of a festival that had been filled with methodical and meditative indie pictures—the kind that can lull you into a sort of academic trance—and then it was dropped like a shrapnel spewing IED at the very end of the weekend. I loved it, but I thought of it as an action film with little character definition.

Bigelow discussed her approach and what she wanted to focus on in a modern war picture, and it was evident from what showed up on screen that she had achieved this. What she said in regards to the character motivations, especially Renner’s Sgt. James, was also illuminating. These are men defined by their actions and their response to action in the field. Of course, most directors of films where things go boom say some variation of this. Now, two more viewings later, I’m of the mind that she’s right.

Like Alfred Hitchcock before her, she understands that film can be an expressive and immediate medium that can crystallize a feeling into a truth just by presenting it to the viewer in the right way. The Hurt Locker moves beyond simple questions of “is this right?” or “what sense do we make of it?” and instead tells us “yes, this is happening and it’s happening right now”. What each of us does with it might be different. For some, like Sgt. James, it’s a never ending rollercoaster that provides him with the only thing that makes sense. For others, it’s the very definition of madness.

Despite the glut of films centered around it over the past few years, the Iraq War has not exactly made for compelling cinema. Tangled in extreme political stance or statement, or designed around a general cluelessness about the way the actual battle itself is being fought, previous pics like In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs and Redacted were dead on arrival.

Instead, The Hurt Locker wisely leaves behind politics and posturing and brings the viewer onto the grimy, narrow streets of downtown Baghdad. With a singularity of vision and a documentarian’s eye for extreme and seemingly inconsequential detail, Bigelow transcends not only her own previous films but typical action clichés to deliver one of the most suspenseful and intense cinema experiences I’ve ever had. Best of all, it is a sustained intensity that can survive the first peek and offer more for those that return.

The film’s structure is perhaps its greatest asset. Essentially, there are about six or seven tense, action-oriented sequences and they occur in succession with only the briefest of interludes in between. There is a repetition to these scenes that brings home the reality of what it must be like to operate in this environment–each day is just one more on the job, terrifying and exotic to us, but business as usual for Bravo Company.

We wait, nervous that a bomb will explode. Bigelow draws out the tension, painting all kinds of little details into the surrounding landscape. Everything looks like trouble, and sometimes bravado prevails, but more often a cool, sensible head. Several recognizable faces show up, and then disappear again. People die when we assume danger has passed, and some scenes escalate and then have no climax. Survival is the goal, but there is no triumphant victory when these guys succeed. When tomorrow holds the same danger and probably the same odds, how optimistic can you be?

To describe Staff Sergeant James, he sounds like a typical action stereotype, but the film avoids that completely. His obsession with the adrenaline rush of being the star player of the bomb squad is internalized by Renner and visualized in the more harrowing passages when Will lingers at the work of manually defusing a car-based explosive while his teammates fret they might all be gunned down in the process. Renner’s job is to play a believable human being and a cipher at the same time, and he excels at it.

I’ve had it pointed out to me by a good buddy of mine who happens to be in the Marines that the idea of a bomb squad unit functioning like the one in this film lies in the realm of fiction. He assures me that James’ reckless hotshot who puts the rush of the job above his fellow teammates would never last in such a scenario and would be washed out as soon as his deficiency was discovered. I know little about the way the military works, but I venture to guess that technically he’s correct.

But what of the possibility of a guy like James existing in the modern military? That seems entirely likely, and that’s the reality the film is going for. It possesses an emotional plausibility that boys will keep playing war if they get a taste for it, regardless of duty, responsibility or morality. Now, thankfully, most of the men in the armed forces I know possess far more of the latter qualities and have little tolerance for the former. But, those exceptions do exist, and Bigelow handles them with a wise restraint.

The script develops James in small bursts, in between the action, but the movie defines him by his grace under pressure in the field sequences. It also doesn’t shy away from the fact that his is a sickness; a psychosis of sorts that might very well do him and his team in if it isn’t held in check. Will has swagger and a personal record of defusing 873 bombs (he keeps a box of detonators under his bed, along with his wedding ring, as a reminder of things that nearly killed him) but in a film like The Hurt Locker there is no guarantee that he, or anyone else for that matter, will live to the next scene.

The world of the Baghdad streets and the nearby military base are presented with such clarity, both in the dynamic cinematography and in the considerable sound design that they take on the feel of a documentary. In getting down into it, and following it with the thrust of a genuine narrative, Bigelow and her team have generated more reality than similar real-life news footage has achieved. The film is a thrill-ride, but it has the presence of mind to flesh out those thrills to the point where the audience is forced to ask: is it really a good thing to desire this kind of thrill? The comic carnage of Transformers this is not.

Visually, the explosions are breath-taking and stomach-churning. When an IED explodes early on, we see the immediate impact shake clots of rust off an abandoned vehicle, thrust and hurl waves of rock and gravel, and fling human bodies through the air, cracking face-plates and breaking bones. There is more information here than we sometimes want. Hard choices and harder realities drop from minute to minute in The Hurt Locker. There is no breathing room left. But instead of a hyperactive upheaval that moves us cleanly from scene to scene like Black Hawk Down, Locker can move agonizingly slow when danger hits. Seconds may seem like hours. The film runs for 131 minutes, but it seems longer than that, and yet we are engaged and riveted for the entire thing.

This is not a message movie, but in reproducing the milieu of war, Hurt Locker provokes thought. Bigelow dissects everything from the daredevil, adrenaline-seeking male warriors to the confused, frustrated, sometimes deadly civilians dealing with an occupation in their already besieged city. In one scene a man in a taxi has approached the site of James latest bomb situation. Sanborn and the others are understandably excited and unnerved by his appearance. James pushes a gun through the window and against his head. If he is part of an insurgent group, this makes sense, and there is no way for anyone to know for sure. Showing weakness could get everyone, including the civilians killed. The man, if he is just a taxi driver, can be somewhat understood in his actions. What he does isn’t smart, but likely frustrated he cannot bring himself to back down from these foreign occupants in his city.

Finally, I think it’s important to note that both this film and Avatar are not the typical front-runners for an Oscar race, and I consider that a very good thing. Both of them tell a story primarily through the resources of film and depend on the visual, the aesthetic and the visceral for their power, more than an elegant script or biting dialogue. These films are throwbacks to the heart of cinema; they are powerful escapes that take us somewhere we aren’t likely to go and they work so well on that level they provoke feelings we are unlikely to have otherwise. In the end, which has more to say? For my money, it’s this one.

Kathryn Bigelow, despite not having any of her own, has specialized in the roaring testosterone of the boy’s club for years. In The Hurt Locker she captures it and then moves beyond it to even more primal urges and emotions; fear and self-preservation.

Editor’s note: Welcome to the thirty-second of a 33-part series dissecting the 82st Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every day leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category of the Oscars. To read any other posts regarding this event, please click the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

By Nathan Bartlebaugh of Cinematropolis.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has gone further than many ever expected it to go.

Opening last summer as a dubious war flick in a time that has seen far too many of them, it seemed destined to open and then disappear. But, it didn’t. It stayed, and stayed and stayed. Now, Bigelow, one of a few female directors ever nominated for Best Director, is going to the Academy Awards with his ‘action-film-that-could’ and a terrific bit of added irony, will go to head-to-head with ex-husband James Cameron for the best picture crown. If she wins, she will be the first woman to take home the honor. And me, I think she has a really good shot of winning it too.

I first saw The Hurt Locker last summer when it played as the closing night event of the Maryland Film Festival, and afterwards Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal sat down for a live-audience interview with Ann Hornaday. At the time, I experienced the film as a purely visceral experience; it was in the context of a festival that had been filled with methodical and meditative indie pictures—the kind that can lull you into a sort of academic trance—and then it was dropped like a shrapnel spewing IED at the very end of the weekend. I loved it, but I thought of it as an action film with little character definition.

Bigelow discussed her approach and what she wanted to focus on in a modern war picture, and it was evident from what showed up on screen that she had achieved this. What she said in regards to the character motivations, especially Renner’s Sgt. James, was also illuminating. These are men defined by their actions and their response to action in the field. Of course, most directors of films where things go boom say some variation of this. Now, two more viewings later, I’m of the mind that she’s right.

Like Alfred Hitchcock before her, she understands that film can be an expressive and immediate medium that can crystallize a feeling into a truth just by presenting it to the viewer in the right way. The Hurt Locker moves beyond simple questions of “is this right?” or “what sense do we make of it?” and instead tells us “yes, this is happening and it’s happening right now”. What each of us does with it might be different. For some, like Sgt. James, it’s a never ending rollercoaster that provides him with the only thing that makes sense. For others, it’s the very definition of madness.

Despite the glut of films centered around it over the past few years, the Iraq War has not exactly made for compelling cinema. Tangled in extreme political stance or statement, or designed around a general cluelessness about the way the actual battle itself is being fought, previous pics like In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs and Redacted were dead on arrival.

Instead, The Hurt Locker wisely leaves behind politics and posturing and brings the viewer onto the grimy, narrow streets of downtown Baghdad. With a singularity of vision and a documentarian’s eye for extreme and seemingly inconsequential detail, Bigelow transcends not only her own previous films but typical action clichés to deliver one of the most suspenseful and intense cinema experiences I’ve ever had. Best of all, it is a sustained intensity that can survive the first peek and offer more for those that return.

The film’s structure is perhaps its greatest asset. Essentially, there are about six or seven tense, action-oriented sequences and they occur in succession with only the briefest of interludes in between. There is a repetition to these scenes that brings home the reality of what it must be like to operate in this environment–each day is just one more on the job, terrifying and exotic to us, but business as usual for Bravo Company.

We wait, nervous that a bomb will explode. Bigelow draws out the tension, painting all kinds of little details into the surrounding landscape. Everything looks like trouble, and sometimes bravado prevails, but more often a cool, sensible head. Several recognizable faces show up, and then disappear again. People die when we assume danger has passed, and some scenes escalate and then have no climax. Survival is the goal, but there is no triumphant victory when these guys succeed. When tomorrow holds the same danger and probably the same odds, how optimistic can you be?

To describe Staff Sergeant James, he sounds like a typical action stereotype, but the film avoids that completely. His obsession with the adrenaline rush of being the star player of the bomb squad is internalized by Renner and visualized in the more harrowing passages when Will lingers at the work of manually defusing a car-based explosive while his teammates fret they might all be gunned down in the process. Renner’s job is to play a believable human being and a cipher at the same time, and he excels at it.

I’ve had it pointed out to me by a good buddy of mine who happens to be in the Marines that the idea of a bomb squad unit functioning like the one in this film lies in the realm of fiction. He assures me that James’ reckless hotshot who puts the rush of the job above his fellow teammates would never last in such a scenario and would be washed out as soon as his deficiency was discovered. I know little about the way the military works, but I venture to guess that technically he’s correct.

But what of the possibility of a guy like James existing in the modern military? That seems entirely likely, and that’s the reality the film is going for. It possesses an emotional plausibility that boys will keep playing war if they get a taste for it, regardless of duty, responsibility or morality. Now, thankfully, most of the men in the armed forces I know possess far more of the latter qualities and have little tolerance for the former. But, those exceptions do exist, and Bigelow handles them with a wise restraint.

The script develops James in small bursts, in between the action, but the movie defines him by his grace under pressure in the field sequences. It also doesn’t shy away from the fact that his is a sickness; a psychosis of sorts that might very well do him and his team in if it isn’t held in check. Will has swagger and a personal record of defusing 873 bombs (he keeps a box of detonators under his bed, along with his wedding ring, as a reminder of things that nearly killed him) but in a film like The Hurt Locker there is no guarantee that he, or anyone else for that matter, will live to the next scene.

The world of the Baghdad streets and the nearby military base are presented with such clarity, both in the dynamic cinematography and in the considerable sound design that they take on the feel of a documentary. In getting down into it, and following it with the thrust of a genuine narrative, Bigelow and her team have generated more reality than similar real-life news footage has achieved. The film is a thrill-ride, but it has the presence of mind to flesh out those thrills to the point where the audience is forced to ask: is it really a good thing to desire this kind of thrill? The comic carnage of Transformers this is not.

Visually, the explosions are breath-taking and stomach-churning. When an IED explodes early on, we see the immediate impact shake clots of rust off an abandoned vehicle, thrust and hurl waves of rock and gravel, and fling human bodies through the air, cracking face-plates and breaking bones. There is more information here than we sometimes want. Hard choices and harder realities drop from minute to minute in The Hurt Locker. There is no breathing room left. But instead of a hyperactive upheaval that moves us cleanly from scene to scene like Black Hawk Down, Locker can move agonizingly slow when danger hits. Seconds may seem like hours. The film runs for 131 minutes, but it seems longer than that, and yet we are engaged and riveted for the entire thing.

This is not a message movie, but in reproducing the milieu of war, Hurt Locker provokes thought. Bigelow dissects everything from the daredevil, adrenaline-seeking male warriors to the confused, frustrated, sometimes deadly civilians dealing with an occupation in their already besieged city. In one scene a man in a taxi has approached the site of James latest bomb situation. Sanborn and the others are understandably excited and unnerved by his appearance. James pushes a gun through the window and against his head. If he is part of an insurgent group, this makes sense, and there is no way for anyone to know for sure. Showing weakness could get everyone, including the civilians killed. The man, if he is just a taxi driver, can be somewhat understood in his actions. What he does isn’t smart, but likely frustrated he cannot bring himself to back down from these foreign occupants in his city.

Finally, I think it’s important to note that both this film and Avatar are not the typical front-runners for an Oscar race, and I consider that a very good thing. Both of them tell a story primarily through the resources of film and depend on the visual, the aesthetic and the visceral for their power, more than an elegant script or biting dialogue. These films are throwbacks to the heart of cinema; they are powerful escapes that take us somewhere we aren’t likely to go and they work so well on that level they provoke feelings we are unlikely to have otherwise. In the end, which has more to say? For my money, it’s this one.

Kathryn Bigelow, despite not having any of her own, has specialized in the roaring testosterone of the boy’s club for years. In The Hurt Locker she captures it and then moves beyond it to even more primal urges and emotions; fear and self-preservation.

URL: http://cinematropolis.wordpress.com/
Site Name: Cinematropolis
Categories: Reviews, Editorials, News, Classic film and general choices. Although I cover film and news from everywhere I also specialize in news local to where I live, in Baltimore.
Rating: PG-13 perhaps. I don’t use any language or extremely lurid details but some of the film photos can feature graphic violence from time to time.

What is the main focus of your site?
The main focus of my site is to talk about and explore the world of film, and how it relates to the community I live in, and how that community contributes to the art form of film at large.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
I’m looking to get experience as a critical writer and I’m doing it for personal enjoyment as well as to gather writing samples.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers are the students?
I’d prefer an interactive community.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
Since May 8th, so by this point, its a little over 3 months old. Although the last two weeks haven’t allowed me to post as much, I try to average about 10 posts a week, and sometimes its a bit more than that.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
Blade Runner, The Wizard of Oz, The Grapes of Wrath

How did you hear about the LAMB?
By clicking a link on another blog.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that’s not listed above.
None.