It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.
For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.
This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.
“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.
Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film. Continue reading “The Hurt Locker”