What is It Good For?

The Hurt Locker (2009)

Although it has only played in selected L.A. and New York theatres for the past month or so, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war thriller has generated its fair share of critical buzz. A scrappy, exciting little firecracker of a movie, The Hurt Locker is focused, razor sharp, and visceral where other films on the subject have failed to be, emerging alongside HBO’s Generation Kill as the definitive filmic representation of the War in Iraq thus far. With the number of Best Picture nominees up from five to ten this year, a small but oh-so-worthy film like Hurt Locker may have a chance of taking home the highly coveted little golden man.

The movie concerns Bravo Company, a three-man team of U.S. soldiers whose task it is to diffuse the numerous bombs hidden around the streets of Baghdad. Their work is both highly specific and extremely dangerous, as evidenced in a nail-biting opener that sets the tone for the rest of the film, with something new and increasingly death-defying to face every day. This is not the kind of bomb squad you are used to seeing in movies, the sweaty techno-geeks who agonize over whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire; which wire to cut is the last thing these guys are worried about. In fact, Bravo Company’s point man (an impressive Jeremy Renner) seems to have few qualms about ripping chords willy-nilly from explosive devices and tossing them aside, easy as pie. The real danger comes from the people who gather around the scene, or watch from nearby storefronts and balconies, any one of whom could pull out a cell phone and remote control detonate the bomb at any second. The constant and unyielding tension created by this simple situation makes for an incredibly suspenseful two hours.

Solid work from Renner and Anthony Mackie as the team’s seasoned lookout are the icing on the cake, but the vast majority of credit must go to Ms. Bigelow. With this film, she puts on a master class in suspense, effortlessly sustaining an atmosphere of nerve-wracking tension throughout. Each scene is meticulously constructed for maximum impact, certainly thrilling, but never forgetting that the heart and soul of a story lies in its characters. She pulls a performance out of Renner that is both charismatic and disturbing, embodying the best and worse of what it means to be a dedicated soldier, while Mackie’s steely exterior hides a fragile soul constantly afraid of losing his comrades. These two men, their clashes, collaborations, and comraderie, are the backbone of the film, and Bigelow milks spot on performances from her two leads.

Undoubtedly the best war film since Three Kings, and in my opinion one of the best ever made about an American war post-1945, The Hurt Locker is a film you won’t soon forget. And if my instincts are correct, neither will Oscar.

AND...

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (1980)

There’s a twenty-four-year-long story behind this version of The Big Red One. The original cut of Sam Fuller’s semi-autobiographical World War II drama was over four hours long, prompting the studio to take it from him and shear it down to under two hours. Despite the director’s highly vocal protests, this studio cut remained the only available version of the film until 2004, when critic Richard Schickel spurred an effort to “reconstruct” a cut closer in spirit to Fuller’s initial vision, using the original shooting script and all existing unused footage as guides. The result is The Reconstruction, a sprawling, two-hour-forty-minute mini-epic focusing on the experiences of some of the most jet-setting soldiers in WWII movie history.

Between 1942 and 1945, the four core members of the 1st Infantry Brigade’s 16th Division, led by the incomparable Lee Marvin, make their way from Algeria to Sicily to Omaha Beach to Belgium to Czechoslovakia. They fight in many battles together, share many laughs, and lose many comrades, so many that they eventually stop bothering to remember the names of new recruits. By the time the war ends, they have shared a lifetime of experiences.

Though a bit meandering, Fuller’s film is fascinating for a number of reasons. It’s core message that the only glory to be had in war is survival is punctuated by a healthy sense of the absurd and a focus on mishaps. The film opens with Lee Marvin stabbing a German soldier four hours after WWI has ended; true, he did not know the war was over, but his ignorance cost a man his life, which has to feel bad no matter what the circumstances. During the group’s liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, Mark Hammill is so disturbed by what he sees that when he finds a Nazi soldier hiding in an oven, he cannot stop shooting him, even after the soldier has dead. It is small, emotionally intimate moments such as these that prove only someone who has experienced these events first hand could have made this film.

The Big Red One is highly personal, which is part of its appeal, but it is also engagingly constructed and very energetic. Its skewed sense of glory and heroism makes it unique in the genre, more along the lines of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings than Saving Private Ryan. Well worth watching, One is a rather unexpected treat.

For more by Sam Fuller, check out his incredible racial allegory White Dog, made two years later in 1982.