The Hurt Locker: 2009

For the 2010 awards, the Academy made one big change to the Best Picture category: instead of the usual five nominees, the Academy allowed up to 10 nominees. In researching for this post, I learned that the Academy used to nominate 10 films. In 1944, 10 films were nominated, but then in 1945, only five films were nominated. The cause for the more recent change focused on popularity; the Academy wanted to include more popular films as nominees. If you want to know more, check out this blog from The New York Times.

The change for the 2010 Oscars meant that films like Up and Avatar were nominated along with Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man. You might think that with the increase in the number of films nominated that I would have seen more of the nominees, but that's not the case. In 2009 I was working full time and attending grad school part time at a campus that was two hours from work and one hour from home. My free time was filled with commuting. Of the 10 nominees, the only I've seen is Up, and that didn't win Best Picture overall but did win Best Animated Picture (as it should!). I've had opportunities to see Avatar and seen clips, but it's another James Cameron film so I'm just not interested. And I've never gotten around to seeing The Blind Side, which was also nominated that year. So as I watched The Hurt Locker, I didn't have a lot of context for its competition other than what I've heard about the other films nominated.

The Hurt Locker is about war. It's not about the people who fight in war (although it was has three main characters) or what the war is about. It's not about what's right or wrong. The way the film was shot makes the audience be part of the disconcerting, overwhelming nature of being in a modern war. Unlike other Academy Award Best Picture winners set in war, The Hurt Locker is set in a modern war, in early 2000s when the United States invaded Iraq. The story is about three men who disarm bombs as other soldiers patrol streets under the military rule that followed the invasion. That plot alone sets the film apart from the other war stories I watched in that I didn't set any epic battles. There is one shoot-out scene but only with a few men involved on each side. The lack of epic battles, though, doesn't make The Hurt Locker any less intense than other war films. If anything it's more intense because it's so intimate.

What unsettled me the most was the use of sound in the film. When Will (played by Jeremy Renner) wears the bomb suit and all you can hear is his breathing echoing in the suit, the danger becomes palpable. Add in Will's need for adrenaline, and these scenes put me on edge. In one scene, the combination of Will's breathing, footsteps, and the gravel scraping along the bombs along with music create so much uncertainty for the audience.

The use of the handheld camera in this scene adds to that uncertainty. All this unsettled moment with the eerie music and sharp sounds made me think that Will wasn't going to survive this situation. Director Kathryn Bigelow deserves recognition based on this scene alone. And the Academy agreed with me: Bigelow was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director.

Would I watch The Hurt Locker again? Probably not, but that isn't due to the film being bad. I would watch scenes again to look more closely at Bigelow's decisions for shots and mise-en-scene, but as a whole, the film was so intense that I think once is enough for me.