My wife Sally and I finally got around to watching The Hurt Locker over the weekend, and I thought it was a pretty good flick. I enjoyed it. I don’t know that I thought it deserved to win Best Picture, but it was a good film. It succeeds at being entertaining while also making its viewers think, and that’s no mean feat.
If you have haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s the story of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team stationed in Iraq. When the team’s leader is killed just a few weeks before the team itself is scheduled to rotate back Stateside, Sergeant First Class William James (not to be confused with the 1970’s pop singer, Rick James) becomes the new team leader, and since Sergeant James seems to be a wild-man who actively LIKES disarming bombs, well, wackiness ensues.
Actually, although this plot point is significant, it’s also one of the few things that I don’t think the movie does very well. Which is to say that at the start of the movie, EOD’s Standard Operating Procedure is to dispose of bombs by blowing them up rather than disarming them. This is in line with actual practice. Why? Because disarming bombs is both slower and more dangerous than simply blowing them in place. So when SFC James comes in, and we see him out there clipping wires and doing his thing, we’re sort of left wondering what’s going on. Is he disarming the bombs because he’s an adrenaline junkie, or is it because he thinks that disarming the bombs is a better method for some reason? Did most viewers even notice the difference? Unfortunately, although the movie hints about it a bit, we never get any of James’s philosophy on the matter, and I found that to be more than a little weird since he struck me as the kind of non-commissioned officer who’d have a million different little philosophies on life and a straight-up willingness to talk your ear off about them. Also: why does he hate the robot so much? Is it because he just likes the danger of getting up-close-and-personal or because he thinks the robot doesn’t do the job correctly? Again, there are only hints—and not very many. Still, by the end of the movie I think the filmmakers have come down firmly on the side of James’s emotional instability, and at least for me that didn’t ring true. How can a mentally unstable guy consistently succeed in a high-pressure job like bomb disposal? Personally, I don’t think he can. And more to the point, I think it’s obvious that James is a very committed man. He’s committed to the Army and to the cause of the Iraqi people. We see this several times. He is obviously NOT crazy. And yet we’re still left to wonder—a lot—about his emotional well-being. And that’s just not the plan at all. Commitment and even enthusiasm for a dangerous job are not at all the same things as emotional instability.
A more common knock on The Hurt Locker is that it doesn’t get the details correct on the tactics of its subjects. This is the critique that you see from veteran’s groups, the one set of critics that generally did not like the film. And while I’m sure that the vet critique is accurate—I mean, who can imagine a three-man EOD team actively hunting snipers while the infantry units next door stand around watching?—I also think this critique misses the point. Look, Hollywood simply does not understand the military. Have you seen Avatar? The last battle sequence in that movie is so silly as to be actively laughable. In fact, I think James Cameron probably WAS laughing when he wrote that crap. Oddly, the ONLY movie of 2010 that had any clue at all about military tactics was Transformers: Rise of the Fallen. And that movie was panned by everyone for being convoluted and unrealistic! Heh. As if a movie about giant transforming robots could ever be considered realistic. But seriously, Transformers got a few things right. For example, its tank commanders know enough to use their main guns’ range to create standoff from the enemy. For Hollywood, that is incredible realism. Anyway, the most probable reason that Transformers looks so good in its battle sequences is that it was made with the active participation of the U.S. military. The Army will help you with these things if you pay them to. Meanwhile, the makers of The Hurt Locker went it alone, playing instead by the seats of their pants. And yeah, their movie suffered for it.
So then, The Hurt Locker is a good movie but not a perfect one. Was it the BEST movie of 2010? That’s obviously up to the individual. For me, I think it was about on par with Avatar. While The Hurt Locker tackles some serious subject-matter, it does so in an oft ham-handed way that took me completely out of the story at times. Much the same could be said for Avatar. I thought Avatar was cool but preachy and at least twice as ridiculous as anything I’ve seen in a good long while. In fact, Avatar’s last battle scene is right up there with the Ewoks and the Imperial Scout Walkers of Return of the Jedi in terms of its sheer absurdity. But still… good movie. Fun. Sexy blue people are three kinds of awesome.
That said, I still like the Transformers. It’s simple math: Transforming Robots + Megan Fox = Blue People on Flying Dinosaurs. I mean, District 9 was also a very good film, but it just can’t match that level of sheer mathematical awesomeness. Plus, Transformers hewed amazingly close to its original source material, never mind that the source material itself was incredibly obscure and totally unnecessary. Actually, given the sheer wacko-weirdness of something like the Autobots’ Matrix of Leadership, I think you have to give T:RotF bonus points for including it. They certainly didn’t have to.
Bottom line, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen was my personal Best Picture for 2010. And no, I don’t give a crap what the Academy has to say about that because they’re all just a bunch of self-important jerk-offs anyway, and I think even they would admit as much. Plus, if their Best Picture includes an obvious Scooby-Doo reference like “Let’s split up, so we can cover more ground” but then fails to come through with either transforming robots or big blue boobies or even a dog named Scooby Doo, then I don’t see that they have anything to complain about.
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