The summer's best American movie, The Hurt Locker, opens in Baltimore one week from today. It's the culmination of a four-year process that began when journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal told director Kathryn Bigelow that he had an assignment from Playboy to be embedded with an Army bomb-defusing squad in Iraq.
Bigelow thought, "There's a movie there. I didn't know what he would come back with, I didn't know any of the details, but I was certain it was a film."
They went on to revive the once red-hot tradition of journalistic moviemaking. Boal not only put in his time at Camp Victory but also culled the wisdom of veterans such as a Baltimore born-and-bred expert on Explosive Ordnance Disposal squads, James Clifford, who retired from the Army as a command sergeant major. (There is no higher grade of rank for an enlisted soldier.)
The movie succeeds in "capturing the essence" of an EOD soldier's life, says Clifford over the phone from his home in Atlanta. "And," he adds, "the context of what an EOD soldier experiences."
As Bigelow stated in an interview in May, before the film's closing-night showcase at the Maryland Film Festival, "We all had heard about EODs and IEDs [improvised explosive devices], but you can hear about them without understanding how they work on a granular level."
The phrase "granular level" perfectly expresses Bigelow's ambition to create a movie that would engage audiences through their pores. The film itself generates an impact that resists easy formulation. Bigelow has become a filmmaker who prizes "the experiential" over formula or theory - and in this movie, her allegiance to reality pays off in thrills and revelation.
In our digital age, uninspired special effects can reduce apocalyptic phenomena to showy trivia. But with blood, sweat and just a few tears, The Hurt Locker brings genuine shock and awe to the close-up spectacle of soldiers toiling with pinpoint expertise while knowing their lives could end with the press of a button, the flick of a switch or the pull of a trigger. It's something you must see to believe.
In a rarity for screenwriters, Boal stayed with the film through every step of production. He even shared interview time with Bigelow in Maryland and other stops on the promotional tour. They met when she optioned an article he had written about an undercover police officer in a high school and helped produce it as a TV pilot.
