Duane Gundrum Movies,Television The Hurt Locker…an interesting peek into the abyss and shopping for cereal

The Hurt Locker…an interesting peek into the abyss and shopping for cereal

I finally got a chance to watch Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker over the weekend. It was interesting to see a movie that covers the military in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s a miltary advertisement (I’m looking at you Transformers 2) or a condemnation (I’m looking at pretty much every Iraqi movie that’s been made so far).

The story is pretty simple. It’s about an EOD specialist whose main job is to defuse bombs. His team works as back-up to him, and the movie follows the events he and his team experience during a rotation in Iraq.

What really stuck out to me was the “team” emphasis the movie explores. This is one of those nuances that happen within the Army involving specialized groups, specifically those with a set mission that rarely can be handled by a regular unit. The main character is a former Ranger, and his team consists of a former mission intelligence sergeant and a specialist-ranked noobie who is pretty much learning his place in the greater scheme of things. I think it covered the specialized nature of the team very well, and it was interesting to see it carried out on film where there was little attempt to glorify it or diminish it with some stupidity (like Platoon, which while it was a decent film ended up focusing on dysfunction rather than function).

One thing that really hit me hard with this movie is a very soft scene after a return to the U.S. when the character is asked by his wife Kate (or whatever her name was…she was played by Evangeline Lilly, the woman who plays Kate in LOST, and she was honestly the only actor in the entire movie I recognized) to find a box of cereal in a supermarket where they’re shopping. This man who is so perfect in a world where it may end at a moment’s notice with people all around him who might be trying to kill him, stands in front of the entire aisle of boxes of cereal and can’t move because he’s overwhelmed by the choices in front of him. This is the sort of person who spends his every moment deciding between green and blue wires (the Hollywood equivalent of a bomb defusion choice, which THANK YOU was not an issue ONCE in this very well done movie), and he was unable to choose a simple box of cereal. That one moment brought the reality of this fictionalized world home for me, and I’ve never seen it done so well.

In the end, I think the movie is deserving of the awards is received. Granted, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was up against a lot of dismal films that year, which is becoming more of a norm than an exception. Even though that was the year of Avatar, a very visual film, at least the Academy recognized that that was ALL it had going for it.

The acting was done well, and the writing was what should be expected from a Hollywood film of this magnitude. Strangely enough, I had trouble finding any acknowledgement of the writing from the closing credits, although it might have flown by me and I didn’t realize it. I was looking for it, however, and was somewhat annoyed that everyone else and his brother was acknowledged, but the writing didn’t seem to be all that important to the makers of the credits.

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