Hurt Locker

I finally watched the Hurt Locker, a few hours before the Academy Awards are handed out. Of the Oscar movies I have not seen this year, it was number one on my list. Seeing it now at home, I should have seen it in the theater. It is a really good movie.

When I think of Kathryn Bigelow before I think of action movies like Point Break and Strange Days. Both of those movies are action movies that suffer from scenes where everything is so important, it starts to become silly. That weakness makes both of these movies campy.

Watching The Hurt Locker was different. Every scene was important. Bigelow did a good job making every scene feel like it could go wrong at any moment. The movie is tense and heavy. All of these things make the movie better. It felt like everything had the right level of emotion importance.

All three of the leads, Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are great in this movie. I think they breath life into these characters. They do a good job of making the characters into real people with real motivations. Too often soldiers are just stereotypes. We have all seen a hundred war movies, it is easy to just make a short cut with the characters. This movie worked so well because they don't take those short cuts.

I think it is very hard to make a good war movie while the war is still going on. Often the politics and real world get in the way of a movie maker approaching the subject matter. In that way this movie is even more impressive. It does not get bogged down in those things, but still seems to be truthful.

I liked Hurt Locker, but I cannot tell other people they will like it. It is difficult like art sometimes needs to be. Often people do not like difficult in the movies they watch.