Philadelphia Film Festival 2009: "The Hurt Locker"

Can Iraq be depicted as an action film? (Consider the severity of the fact that soldier boys are committing suicide at an alarming rate.) Is this film supposed to be taken as a document of realism, or a document of sensationalism? Does Kathryn Bigelow (director of the afternoon TV action classic, Point Break) transcend her normative action director stance, and is she asking us to sympathize with soldiers overseas in a war so futile as to raise speculation that we are purely addicted to the spectacle of war as the controlling raison d'etre? Among the marketing taglines, one simplistically runs, 'War is a drug,' as if it were among the great unknown truths known to modern times. (In fact if I am not mistaken the same line appears as an introductory note to the film, in case the audience is unaware of its inner addiction to violence.)

There is a single value to this film: it is a terrifically directed action film. Wartime provides better support to the plotless plots of hollywood actioners than the run of the mill productions that depend so much on a key point of anarchy in a civilized society (for instance, there will always be a serial killer, a rapist, a terrorist, a criminal mastermind, a Dr. Evil or what-have-you, running amok in an otherwise peaceable society, the appearance of whom causes the reluctant or not so reluctant hero to conduct himself according to the social laws that employ and restrict him, while coming into communion with the baser violent nature in himself so freely glorified in the villain.) Even the emptier actioners that may or may not star Van Damme or Steven Seagal or, currently, Jason Stratham, have to somehow concoct a dramatic permise flimsy yet functional enough for the action to brew steadily and with little to no interruption. The Hurt Locker has no such roadblocks or difficulties - there is no need for a criminal mastermind or a remorseless killer who dons a face or a name to menace the proceedings. The film's thrust derives from the simplified premise of war (as a drug, and consequently, as an action film), in which no one villain manifests, and so from the 1st frame to the last, any concern for the other emotions (of romance, of ambition, of peace, of honor, etc.) that old school war films so long worked to contrive amid the bombs and bullets is thrown out the window. The film prides itself on its realism and believes its fastidious attention to detail and undiminshed intensity to explain itself sufficiently without any need for dramatic scaffolding. Not surprisingly, this negligence of dramatic cultivation remains the film's virtue and vice. We are provided with breathlessly composed action sequences that pile on each other with little to no interruption, and with infinitely more ease than any riotous actioner could manage (even hardcore kung fu films, notoriously bereft of any dramatic gestation, are matched by this film's piledriving action scene for scene - the typical excuses for a kung fu fight to take place are matched by the omnipresent threat of bombs and terrorists lurking in the shadows of broad daylight.)

The film's trite ending, and its feeble attempt at dramatic afterthought (where the protagonist returns home after finishing his tour of duty and finds life's domestic misery to be ridiculously exemplified by a supermarket aisle whose entire shelf is covered by cereal boxes [!?]), demonstrate how internally empty the film is once removed from the spectacle ('the drug') of war. But the film is exonerated from any pernicious negligence of the real issues at work in the Iraq war, since its aims are largely nugatory: its major fault is the action film's common but excusable sin; that is, it suffers from an adherence to the necessary demands of the genre (more action, less dialogue). Instead of taking Bigelow's The Hurt Locker as a serious film about a seriously unjust war, it should be seen in light of Seagal's classic On Deadly Ground, which incongruously devotes the last few minutes of its conclusion (after a mindless but expected 80 minutes of righteous action) to serenading us with a powerpoint lecture by Seagal on the ills of global warming and oil drilling.
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