EOD team leader Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner).

The Hurt Locker
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty
Distributed by: Roadshow

So it’s just won six Oscars, including Best Film. But we all know those are rigged. So if you haven’t seen The Hurt Locker yet, should you? YES. YOU SHOULD.

Last year I watched somewhere between 70 and 80 films, yet few of them have stayed with me as The Hurt Locker has. It’s actually made me want to watch more movies about contemporary warfare, and since then I’ve seen two: Green Zone and Brothers. Neither of them packed as hard a punch.

For me, what makes The Hurt Locker so masterful is that, in bomb disposal ace Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner), it introduces an affable protagonist whose qualities, in other action films, are often held up as virtues. Good-looking in a rough-hewn way, fearless, resourceful and cool-headed in a crisis, James has a cigarette in his mouth, iPod buds in his ears and a wisecrack on the tip of his tongue. Bigelow makes you warm to James as he rides out the familiar narrative waves of procedural drama, disarming a diabolical variety of insurgent weaponry and saving the day again and again with his unorthodox methods.

But she gradually reveals the devastating truth: he’s fucked in the head. James is a drowning man, desperately clutching for meaning in life. He’s to be pitied rather than admired.

After Staff Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce), the leader of an elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad, is blown up by an improvised explosive device in Iraq, James flies in from Afghanistan to replace him and quickly pisses off the other team members, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Eldridge is traumatised by his failure to prevent Thompson’s death, drawing little comfort from his chats with the well-meaning, patrician army shrink Colonel Cambridge (Christian ‘The Ice Truck Killer’ Camargo).

Sanborn’s a pragmatist, just counting down the days until their tour ends. He’s astounded and furious that James seems so cavalier with his own life – and theirs. And he has good reason. The scenes in which the team searches for bombs in Baghdad streets are taut with tension. I was pleased that The Hurt Locker won Oscars for sound design and editing, because the rustling of rubbish and crunching of gravel in these scenes are filled with dread; any person or object in the street could blow up.

"Put the Oscars over there": director Kathryn Bigelow on the Hurt Locker set.

It’s understandable, but nonetheless annoying, that films about a conflict in which the US is still deeply implicated get raked over the coals for ‘accuracy’ and for perceived political bias. People seem to be searching for the war film that ‘perfectly’ conveys the experience of those on the ground – neither too sentimentally nor too cynically. From what I’ve read, there’s a consensus that the 2008 HBO miniseries Generation Kill, based on a book by embedded reporter Evan Wright, is one of the most ‘accurate’.

Meanwhile, there are countless vox-pops and whingey IMDB and YouTube comments from US defence personnel arguing that The Hurt Locker has totally misconstrued the way an EOD team operates. This annoys me, because police officers, doctors, lawyers, intelligence agents and forensics professionals don’t seem driven to pick holes in the countless movies and TV shows about their jobs.

Others have given The Hurt Locker a serve for not ‘making a statement’ about the US’s Iraq intervention, but its politics are more visceral than hand-wringing dramas such as Stop-Loss, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and In The Valley of Elah… and certainly far less embarrassing than the neo-colonialist visions of Avatar.

Thanks to Bigelow’s framing and her manipulation of light, we see the locals as James and his team do: as ambivalently hostile figures surveilling them from the shadows while the soldiers toil, vulnerable, in the blinding desert sun. Not only in their job, but also in the entire Iraqi intervention, nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted; in an unsettling subplot, even James’s gruff friendship with an Iraqi kid is revealed to be illusory. A powerful atmosphere pervades the film: you are not welcome here.

Bigelow is known for directing ‘blokey’ films, and it’s also annoying that this is deemed noteworthy for a woman director. But there’s a scene in the barracks, in which James and Sanborn express their antagonism by drunkenly punching and wrestling, that reminded me of the homosocial (and homoerotic) tension between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break: that same primacy of male bodies.

I’ve had conversations about whether the film’s ending is disappointing, but I felt it was essential to see James out of combat in order to understand why he feels at home in it. That James defuses bombs is the central irony of The Hurt Locker, because he is like a bomb – a shell of a guy who only really comes to life in the imminence of death – and yet he can’t defuse his own desire for destruction.