The Hurt Locker

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

(R)

****

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A realistic look at the life and struggles of U.S. soldiers in Iraq

The Hurt Locker is the film about Iraq we’ve been waiting for, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Director Kathryn Bigelow plays down the politics and plays up the human truth of war. Though set in Baghdad in 2004, the film is a “classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place almost anytime, anywhere.” What makes it so compelling is a “pinpoint accuracy in mapping the disorienting roads a man can walk down when his job keeps him so close to death,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Working from material he acquired as an embedded journalist in Iraq, screenwriter Mark Boal follows a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad, exploring the costs and demands of heroism and probing the “intersection of bravery and obsession, of risk and responsibility.” The Hurt Locker is a “war movie that rarely goes ‘boom,’” said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. There’s plenty of breathless action, but a “tense quietness” gives the film its uncanny power.