The visceral shocks are also shocks of recognition in The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's spellbinder about Army bomb squads in Iraq. Watching it, you feel you're in the presence of art completely of the moment and also aesthetically new.
This film pioneers observational action moviemaking. It sensitizes you to changes in atmosphere that portend danger and convey hidden meaning while furthering the plot and the characters. And it does so while reporting aspects of the Iraq war that have never before been fleshed out.
Whether the men are blowing off steam in Camp Victory or pulling off a defusing operation in a sandy Baghdad street, anything in sight can set off reverberations with mortal consequences. When Iraqi adults suddenly appear on a tower or in a window, it's impossible to tell whether they hope to detonate a bomb or watch Americans help secure their neighborhood. A man with a camera might be monitoring troop movements or taking home movies - or giving and receiving orders to and from others just a few rooftops away.
Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, immediately pull viewers into an engulfing yet intimate panorama. The story seems simple; in the playing, it's anything but. Three men in a bomb unit count the 38 days to the end of their Baghdad rotation. We watch them confront cunning devices every day as well as adapt to an unsettling group chemistry.
For months or years, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) has helped anchor the team with the can-do sanity and street wisdom he's built up from several tours in military intelligence. At the start, he's a bulwark for impressionable Spec. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). But within the opening minutes, circumstances force a new and enigmatic leader for this tight-knit squad: Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), a man who jolts the truth back into that overused word "maverick."
Sanford and Eldridge have been trained to serve as the auxiliary eyes and ears for experts who don protective suits and defuse IEDs (improvised explosive devices). But James shakes off their support. He approaches each bomb as an antagonist in single-warrior combat. He dispenses information to his cohort on what he considers a need-to-know basis, rules and procedures be damned.
