Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) dismantles roadside bombs as part of an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad. In addition to being very good at it, he’s also very taken with the excitement of risk and the pleasure he receives from locating and detonating bombs. In “The Hurt Locker,’’ the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don’t realize how riveted you are until you’re back on American soil observing James in civilian life. He seems discontent in his role as husband, father, and man of the house, like an athlete who misses the game.
The Hurt Locker
In Iraq, explosively high stakes: Soldiers at work in the fog of war take precedence over politics in ‘Hurt Locker’
Screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have made a unique film about war. Other movies have looked and felt the way this one does - hot, suspenseful, as if something could go wrong at any moment. But “The Hurt Locker’’ suppresses the politics of war, particularly this war where the politics always seem to hover, unstable, in the ether. It focuses, instead, on men who exist in combat’s shadow. The bomb squad arrives on the scene in the grace period before daily calm becomes deadly chaos. Troops hang back. Iraqi civilians hide. The bomb squad waxes poetic.
In the opening minutes, Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), of Bravo Company, leads a conversation about the art of the explosion, the way the clouds of smoke and flame fill the sky. In their understanding, the plume itself is distinguishable from the violence that produced it. Their rapture is theoretical, since, not much later, a botched dismantling shows us the real thing in all its grisliness and dreadful immediacy. The beauty of the detonation (rocks seem to levitate off the ground) can’t compete with the bomb’s devastation.
Just that fast, Boal and Bigelow have given us the astronomical stakes for these men and what it means for things to go wrong. Death is always a millimeter away. They keep romance on the one hand and reality on the other. The accident makes room for Sergeant James to join Bravo. His two young comrades, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Todd Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), don’t know what to do with him. When they meet, only 38 days remain in their tour, and James’s unorthodox approach suggests they might not make it to 37.
In his first assignment with the solemn Sanborn and the underripe Eldridge, he forgoes the robotic drone the squad uses to assist in detonations and gets right up close to a possible improvised explosive device. “I think I found something,’’ he mumbles as much to himself and to the bomb as to Sanborn and Eldridge, who provide anxious cover in the dwindling minutes they have until insurgents descend. He’s the Bomb Whisperer.
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