Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 masterpiece, The Hurt Locker, conjures empathy for the soldiers on the ground in Iraq, taking us inside one bomb disposal unit's experience of ever-present violence and fear. With masterful performances by the entire cast, a desolate and menacing recreation of Baghdad city squares shot on location in Jordan, and most pivotally, the spatial clarity of the editing and camerawork, the film's style is rooted in realism, and its focus on the bomb disposal unit is a politically appropriate microcosm given the disproportionate injuries and casualties caused by IED's. Critics in the military have rightly pointed out the erroneousness of some of the uniforms and the improbable recklessness of the protagonist, Sgt. James (played by Jeremy Renner with equal parts loose-cannon charisma and technical exactitude). Yet James' hotdog bravado, though exaggerated, doesn't function to Hollywoodize the action so much as provide insight into the traumatized psychology of many members of the military, as articulated by Chris Hedges' thesis (and the film's opening statement) that "the rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Utilizing the aesthetics of both war-zone journalism and horror movies, the Hurt Locker demands that we viscerally empathize with characters that represent a manipulated military underclass engulfed in a devastating political, social, and humanitarian calamity. In doing so, The Hurt Locker is both a humanistic consideration of war's life and death consequences and, and by extension, an indictment of the indifference inherent to hawkish ideology and warmongering.
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