First, let me start by admitting that I am a sucker for any movie that presents itself as a realistic portrayal (kind of an oxymoron, I know) of the horrors of war. I’m not sure why – perhaps because through the accident of excellent timing, I haven’t had to experience the real thing. Vietnam was tearing the country apart while I was in grade school; the recently departed Robert McNamara was a name and a face that I saw on the evening news. I understood his historical role but was too young to have been at risk for what the country (and he) came to recognize as a colossal failure of American foreign policy. Desert Storm came far later than the age at which I might have considered the military as a career option. The subsequent actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq – well, let’s just say that I’m more concerned about the possibility of my 12-year old risking his life if those conflicts continue for another decade. Watching movies like Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Apocalypse Now and Black Hawk Down provides a bit of insight into the experience that I’ve been fortunate enough to miss. I understand two things – that friends and family that have served the country over the course of the past 70 years have seen and experienced things that have made a profound impact on them, and that we as a society owe them a debt of gratitude for everything that we hold dear.

The history of the 20th century is defined by major conflicts across the globe; geo-political tectonic shifts in world order, halting the horrors of Hitler, the proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War and the re-emergence of ethnic civil wars in the Baltics and Africa, all speak to war as huge tidal struggles. When you read the books of Stephen E. Ambrose (Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers), war is a very personal and intimate set of struggles; those of individual survival, loss and fear. The challenge of the movie genre is to represent either the epic nature of the conflict or the more personal experience.

In The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have focused on the very personal and immediate worlds of three members of an Army bomb disposal squad deployed in 2004 in Baghdad during the height of the Sunni insurgency. IED’s are hidden in piles of garbage, parked cars, buried in the sand, strapped to men and in one particularly horrifying instance, implanted in a child. Why the expert and possibly reckless Staff Sergeant James is in Iraq with his colleagues Sanborn and Eldridge is not a question that is ever answered. The narrative is the countdown to the end of their deployment, i.e., how to not die in the month or so before they get to go home. The tension during the 2 hours of the movie is almost unbearable, the sensation of claustrophobia, danger and unrelenting desert heat is palpable. This is a taut and hyper-kinetic movie with three dimensional characters that we care about. Every street and building is populated with potential enemies, every foray in the Humvee into the streets of the city carries the risk of death. The dialogue is smart and real – it carries alternately the bravado, fear, resignation and determination of the characters. The performance of Jeremy Renner is deserving of an Oscar or Golden Globe as is the direction of Bigelow. This is a great movie but is not for the faint of heart.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDHGF4tDdKc