The Hurt Locker
Sometimes I feel like watching these films which got rave reviews is like taking the easy way out. I pretty much have a guarantee that this will be a well-funded film which can’t be all too bad. “The Hurt Locker” is the perfect example of such a case. (I love how my spell checker just turned my typo “p erfect” into “p erect”.)
I was going to rant on how much I liked the film: it’s been awhile since I saw a war movie and while I grew up seeing an innumerable amount of trash films that were just glorifying war and violence, I now love my healthy dose of war films, thanks to Kubrick et al. But while “The Hurt Locker” is wonderfully down to earth in some respects and mostly shows the actual cruelties of war, at the end of the day, I realized that the film lacks one major thing – the emotional impact such a film typically makes on me. I am not talking about pathos which is the exact opposite as that makes things feel fake. What I mean is the depiction of that would touch me like, say, “Cool Hand Luke” would. Or the death of the Vietnamese girl at the end of “Full Metal Jacket”.
I do feel sorry for those people who are in this job and will see a film that describes it as dramatic and filled with psychopaths. Now I am rather curious how “Jarhead” is doing when it comes to that. Without having any sort of experience of my own, that one just feels more realistic. My esteem for the film is indeed so high that I dared to mention it to soldiers whom I had a conversation with during a long wait at an airport.
But really, imagine you have one of the world’s most dangerous jobs and then somebody goes out there and makes a movie that makes everything spectacular in the way they want to. It would probably not be for me, and in the case of “The Hurt Locker”, where it really is about life and death, I personally deal much better with realistic films like “Jarhead” or, much better even, with satires and parodies such as “Dr. Strangelove”, “Full Metal Jacket” or “Paths of Glory”.
The main character was too much of a crazy psychopath for me to be able to relate to it, even though I was majorly touched when he bonded with this Iraqi boy, and then did his best to save this civilian. As much as I liked these very human parts of the story, I had a hard time not thinking about how much he put his colleagues in danger. I adore brave and hate reckless people, and obviously the line in between is extremely thin.
Whenever I read the critical reactions on “The Hurt Locker”, I totally feel like it’s about some other movie, but indeed, it was a good film and perhaps one of those movies you should see. In terms of personal enrichment however, I probably gained less than I expected.