Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Hurt Locker- a war classic? You are kidding… right


End of the decade witnessed yet another Iraq war movie…
It was just similar to the earlier Iraq war movies like the Valley of Elah, Redacted etc. It was made of a small budget, it almost bombed in box office, and it only got $16m from theatres.
But there are couple of differences that Hurt Locker has from the above movies…
1. It portrays US troops in Iraq as heroic and it never asks the question why they are in Iraq.
2. It was critically lauded and thus became one of the most overrated films of 21st century.


The film starts with a quote “War is a drug”. Gripping… isn’t it? But the whole journey till the end credits of this movie isn’t that gripping. This war movie directed by Katherine Bigelow is a good war movie, but never ever in any standards, is a war classic.

Let us see what makes Hurt Locker a good (or may be an okay) movie….

The best part is that the movie is backed by wonderful acting by a comparatively unknown cast led by Jeremy Renner. Support cast including Anthony Mackie and Bryan Geraghty has also done a fabulous job. Film was well shot, using the shaky cam technique effectively. There was surely a thrill element in the movie though the script failed to retain that until the end due to repetitive bomb diffusion scenes. But Bigelow knew the art of thrillers by framing shots not longer than 2 or 3 secs.
Hurt Locker tried to induce some depth to characterization… and made a good visual feel with that low budget.

Now see why Hurt Locker is not a great movie….

Plot… that’s the main fault of this movie. Movie squanders around the so called ‘real’ emotional spectrum of the characters but it never answers the age old question of credibility of war and it deliberately avoids any politics. It never asks why US troops are there in Iraq, for some this is the best part of the movie but in reality it is the worst.

“The film opens with a quote from Chris Hedges saying that war is a drug. ... The film makes that quite clear, but I am not sure it says a whole lot more than that”
-Mark R Leeper (Film Critic)

“Beautifully shot, well acted, and completely unfocused to the point of, well, what was the point? ... don't be fooled.”
-Kevin Ranson (Film Critic)

The lack of point of the movie in the above mentioned reviews is commendable. It just portrays some intense shots and and never search for the real story of war.

Then, Hurt Locker is really unidimensional. Lets face it, its never real, just a perception. Even the tagline says it. Every Iraqi is a potential enemy and every object in Iraq a weapon…. that’s what the movie says. The main characters of the movie are bomb diffusers, so they will get enough sympathy and they don’t have to kill people. For God’s sake, don’t say that, this is what war is. It is just one irrelevant side or one perception of the deepest and most complex phenomenon of Human History- War.
And as a film, Hurt Locker never put forward any new narrative styles, Shaky camera was well used in Bourne series, thriller genre or war genre got nothing new from this overrated flick.

War Classic.. That’s sacrilege

What is a real war classic? Apocalypse Now… that’s my choice. Let us add a couple more.
Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket are wonderful war films full of artistic essence. How could any movie buff possibly think about naming Hurt Locker along with these classics? There is a shack full of good war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Thin Red Line, Letters from Iwo Jima etc. I am just naming a few. I strongly feel, Hurt Locker as a war movie doesn’t fit even in this league.
May be Hurt Locker deserves an Oscar because not a single one of these above mentioned movies got best picture Oscar and it is a tradition that great classics will never get an Oscar.
And Hurt Locker is nowhere near a classic.

Hurt Locker – The front Runner for Oscars.

It’s natural. Hurt Locker portrays US troops as heroic and in Avatar they are the bad guys. And about Inglorious Basterds, the academy doesn’t have the movie maturity to accept a tarantinoesque flick… Whatever the outcome I just has only one thing to say:- IDGC
“I don’t give a crap”

6 comments:

  1. Hurt Locker is way overrated. The plot was weak and disjointed and the movie failed to produce any kind of message or theme about war. The movie is so inaccurate it makes my head spin. It's shameful that so many critics think this is a good movie, and even worse, a classic. If they are going to call Hurt Locker a war classic, then they might as well give the Oscar to Transformers.

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  2. Sorry, but this article is complete nonsense. The Hurt Locker clearly DOES have a political aspect, it just doesn't bash you over the head with its agenda. The accomplishments of Bigelow's film (apart from some absolutely superb action sequences) are twofold: first and foremost it's a brilliant character study of a disturbed soldier; second, it manages to convey a view on the Iraq War whilst retaining subtlety and without being preachy or overblown, a la Lions For Lambs, Redacted et al.

    The key scene that makes the film an obvious statement on Iraq, and thus political political, is the scene in the professor's house: (Spoilers ahead, obviously)

    James, an American soldier, charges into the house brandishing a weapon and demanding to know where a child is. The professor, whose house he's just broken into, is actually calm and welcoming to this "guest", urging him to sit down and explain himself. This is clearly meant to symbolise those Iraqis who were in favour of the invasion and were willing to help their American occupiers. And then on the other hand, there's the professor's wife, who shouts and screams and demands for this foreigner to leave her home immediately. This is obviously indicative of the other view held by Iraqis: that the Americans were not welcome and had absolutely no business in invading their home/country. In the midst of all this, with one side urging you to stay and other demanding you to leave, you have the confused American soldier, in search of something that wasn't actually there in the first place, and who is at a loss for what course of action to take. It's an evident comment on the sheer senselessness of the war, how it was so incompetently thought out and executed, and how in the end all it accomplished was accentuating the mutual distrust and lack of communication between civilians and armed forces.

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  3. It might not ask why the troops are there, sure. But what it does instead is accept that as a given and instead focus on how badly things have been handled since, as well as how the conflict affects its partakers.

    This article says that the film paints all American soldiers as heroic and just. Were we watching the same film? Just because the film doesn't have a psycho soldier who indiscriminately kills Iraqis doesn't mean that it shirks back from portraying American soldiers as morally suspect. It's hardly blindingly sympathetic to their plight or shows them in an unfalteringly heroic light. You obviously missed the scene where an American colonel orders the extrajudicial execution of an injured insurgent despite the fact that he could easily live.

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  4. Additionally, a film doesn't necessarily need a plot. For these people in Iraq, who live their lives defusing bombs, there is no narrative. Attaching one would only feel trite and superfluous. Raging Bull, a film widely considered one of the greatest ever, has virtually no story. In terms of character development, it's about a brutal man who steadily gets worse and worse. That in a way is similar to The Hurt Locker: James starts off already an adrenaline junkie and over the course of the film we see how that has ultimately destroyed his ability at doing anything else, as well as shattering the friendships he's made while on his tour of duty by putting his comrades lives at risk in the search for a fix (after Eldridge has been shot). By the end of the film he's altered to such an extent that his ability to adapt to a normal life back home is eroded entirely. The film demonstrates "War is hell" (to use that ancient phrase) from a different perspective: for the likes of James, he's completely unable to forge a relationship with anybody outside combat, being disconnected from his wife and even his young son. That to me was something substantial and evoked superbly through the performances and Bigelow's direction.

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  5. Also, perhaps the reason The Hurt Locker wins over Avatar is because the former is a substantial piece of drama rather than a mishmash of numerous other archetypical stories underneath some neat special effects.

    In my opinion, The Hurt Locker is an instant classic, and a real candidate for one of the best war movies of recent years. It's better than something as sentimental as Private Ryan, which incidentally is a film that in my view epitomizes overrated: you deplore The Hurt Locker for portraying all Iraqis as the enemy and harbingers of death. There's not one sympathetic portrayal of a German in Private Ryan. Therefore, were all German soldiers like this? SPR is a film that also wants it every which way: it wants to illustrate the horror of war (which it does well in the opening sequence), but at the same time wants to have explosive, crowdpleasing, fantastical action. In the climactic battle, it's all about blasting away all those filthy krouts.

    In short, I strongly disagree with this article.

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  6. Nice comment, esp i never got the politics or symbolism in that movie. Thanks for that. but as said in the article, movie is unidimensional. It is charcter driven, but it never truly potrays what happens in a war. So first of all it cant be considered as a good war movie. If Renner's character was a firefighter or some other proffesional involved in hazardous work, there would have been no diff. It tells the story about a man working in a dangerous situation, but the camera is blind towrds war.

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