Bigelow Fest: The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is such a good movie that it makes up for every misstep in Bigelow’s career. It plays like a lost Sam Fuller film and coming from me that’s no small praise. Its daring in both the ways it ignores and subverts genre conventions, and its sickening stylistic clarity marks is Bigelow at her best.

It’s one of those movies that hits the ground running. Much has been written about the opening scene, but God damn it’s a beauty, going off with the precision of a Swiss watch fulfilling about fifty different functions at once. Not only does it set up the character dynamics that’ll power the rest of the film, it gives you a rudimentary course in Bomb Design and Army Protocol. It sets up a textbook situation with an IUD then watches as the team tries to disarm it using the play book.

Starting the film with a tutorial is a stroke of genius. Not merely demonstrating just how badly things can go when everything goes “right” but by setting it up so when Remmer’s character starts to improvise and go off manual you know what he’s doing, why it matters, and just how wrong it can go. Not to mention starting with a basic bomb allows us to see how each of the improvisations the crew comes across later complicates things further. In short it lets the movie go off without a single further scene of exposition. Rather then having to explain to us what’s going wrong, we know what’s going wrong. Its one of the boons of treating the audience with intelligence. And in my opinion The Hurt Locker should be taught in every Screenwriting 101 class in the world.

The scripts other stroke of genius is its subversion of the maverick archetype. We’ve seen the character who plays by his own rules in practically every movie ever. Normally though its from the perspective of The Maverick. So when we see Mel Gibson crash his car through the front of a bank and watch all the uniformed officers run for cover. We think “Ha ha what pussies they don’t have the balls Mel has fuck them.”

Hurt Locker expertly portrays just how pants shittingly terrifying it would actually be to work with one of those people. It’s a movie from the perspective of the uniformed cops running for cover. When you’re on a job where literally every assignment can get you killed, rules tend to be there for a reason. And watching Renner cavalierly disregard his own safety and by extension his units, you understand why his partner’s consider fragging him, despite his often brilliant leaps of intuition and insight.

And Christ Bigelow puts you right in the meat grinder scene after scene after scene. Like The Big Red One and Generation Kill, the only films I can think of to compare this one too. There’s no master plot no grand mission. Just these guys waking up in a bad situation every day. Going to sleep then waking up in a worse one. Its one punishing vignette after another, and the best ones particularly one involving Ralph Fiennes, a crew of British soldiers and some unseen snipers, just burn their way into your brain. The only narrative arc is as the film winds its way to the pitch black ephiphany that some people don’t leave hell because they don’t want to.

This film marks Bigelow as one of the sharpest talents working today. Twenty years into her career and it feels like she’s just getting started (Here’s hoping she makes the Triple Frontier before I Escaped From The Taliban) and I don’t mean that as an insult.