One Paragraph Movie Review: The Hurt Locker

Two hundred and forty-third film: The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie set in the Iraq War about some of the worst qualities humans can have. She examines the crafty way bad people improvise bombs, and the personality traits required to want to be the person who defuses them. I wasn’t at all surprised about how stressful a movie about a bomb-disposal expert in a war zone can be, but I was surprised at how many reviews of it there are that list the ways it’s not a flawlessly accurate depiction of what being a bomb-disposal expert in a war zone is like. A war movie is no more a documentary than a rom-com or gangster film — realism is good, to-the-letter accuracy is unnecessary. What is necessary is feeling things when watching things, and The Hurt Locker made me feel lots of things, all of them tightly clenched. This is a very exciting movie that explores the difference between a highly reasonable hardass who doesn’t want to die and a reckless hardass who would rather die than go supermarket shopping. And the difference between a green wire and a yellow wire, albeit briefly. Good. Tense. Good. Four Hyundais-on-fire out of five.