The Spoils of War

Wars can be addictive, and no film shows it better than The Hurt Locker. It places you straight into the bomb suit of Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a bomb expert and squad team leader in Iraq in 2004. The temperature outside is 40 degrees and you are in a 40 kg steel-plated suit that makes you look like an astronaut. In front of you is a cache of powerful explosives that will flatten the entire city block if you fail to defuse it. Red wire, Green wire. Seconds tick by, strangers who are potentially the insurgents that planted the bomb, gather and point towards you, while a local takes a video of the entire ordeal, perhaps to upload on YouTube. That simple binary choice of two colours decides whether you are returning home or not.

A film that neither preaches pacifism, nor justifies military aggression, The Hurt Locker is about the men and women in the battle-zone who are neither “destroying the enemy”, nor protecting the values of liberty, fraternity and equality. They are there to save their buddies, so that all can go back alive, and not in the refrigerated locker, from where the film gets its name. The movie is less about war than the raw emotions of war that fascinate us.

James is recklessly addicted to defusing bombs, and is a genius at it. However, his recklessness puts Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Elridge, his teammates, at unease. Sanborn is a responsible fellow who wants to go by the book, while Elridge just wants to go home alive. They are good, brave soldiers, but do not share James’ fascination and addiction to work.

The director Kathryn Bigelow, and the writer Mark Boal, have both been to the Middle East in recent times, and therefore have understood the issue very well. The camera angle, typical of the handheld type from the American TV series The Office, gives an air of documentary to the entire experience. The camerawork also successfully portrays mutual distrust between the Iraqis and American soldiers: the Iraqis viewing the soldiers as loathsome necessities, and the soldiers viewing every Iraqi as an assassin or a suicide bomber.

Without a proper storyline till the last half hour, the film follows the soldiers as they move around Baghdad doing their job. The tension that arises from one single wrong choice of wires can be unbearable at times. After all, people watch war films to see soldiers die in the hundreds, or thousands, not to see the hero save the day with his superpowers. The dialogues are what one would expect from a war film: quick and dirty, but cliché-ridden. There are only so many times you can kill the senior-ranking inexperienced desk officer and still expect the audience to be shocked.