Film Impressions

REVIEW: The Hurt Locker

THEATRE OF WAR

Hand-held cameras are sometimes used carelessly in cinema to work up a scene to frenzy. In Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, they’re placed gingerly next to members of a bomb disposal squad stationed in Baghdad to take the audience as close to the tension as possible. Often the feeling is of standing in the oppressive heat yourself under the weight of suffocating protective gear taking tentative steps towards a potential explosive device under the gaze of unknown and perhaps hostile eyes peering down through windows and balconies.

REVIEW: The Hurt Locker

INSIDE HELL

The Hurt Locker has already gone down in movie history for fetching the Oscar for its director Kathryn Bigelow, who is the first female director to have won it.

It is one of many films that have come out in recent times, criticizing the role of the US in the Middle East (this week’s other release Green Zone attacks the whole WMD fiasco), but it also makes a larger anti-war statement, and what the artificial machismo of the war zone does to the psyche of people —and never mind which side they are on (an Iraqi boy who calls himself Beckham plays an important part). The film looks disturbingly real, mainly because Mark Boal, who wrote the screenplay, was with a bomb squad in Baghdad.