Screening Notes: The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a movie that I've seen a few times and every time that I have seen it I have tried to like it. Try as I might, I still cannot get past the sense of hopelessness that it portrays and the depressing tones that Bigelow creates while depicting war. This being said, I do believe that The Hurt Locker does depict war scenes and death uniquely that other films do not do- it does not glamorize war, and shows only the negative effects.

In the scene in which a little boy is made into a body bomb is extremely emotional. Jeremy Renner thinks that it is a boy he had once befriended, and instead of blowing up the body, like what the crew assumed would happen, he removed the bomb from inside the body. Renner contemplates what he needs to do, and his actions reflect this extremely well. He walks out of the 'room' made by walls of a plastic sheet and curses. The audience can tell what is going through the actor's mind because he is trying to make a decision of what to do, especially because he believes he knows the victim.

In the scene where our trio finds the mercenaries (or bounty hunters), they are attacked by an Iraqi sniper team. It seems that one by one, characters that we were barely introduced to are killed off, and the audience does not feel closure. The shots do not focus on the people that are killed, just on the people trying to survive. Because of this, the audience feels detached from those who are killed, creating a sense of 'survival of the fittest' and that the living should do anything to survive. This is a sad concept, but in war, as Bigelow shows, it is necessary.

Following the scene where Renner removes the bomb from the child, Colonel Cambridge is killed by an IED. When the bomb goes off, the camera is inside the Humvee, separated from the incident - protected. In one shot, it shows Cambridge standing, and within the same shot, he is consumed by the blast and smoke, and then he disappears. This shot is powerful because it shows the ephemeral nature of life when in war, even if the person is not a warmonger. In one shot, a life can be taken.