The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker succeeds in putting you in a place where no one would want to be. That all of the characters do not share this sentiment drives the theme of the movie.

Very few members of the audience have been anyplace as strange, threatening and dangerously confusing as the landscape of this movie.

The famous early scene in Platoon dropped you into the jungle; you couldn’t help but identify with the frenzied desperateness of those recruits, especially looking down upon them from that increasing aerial shot. The jarring transition from wedding celebration to field of battle in The Deer Hunter says everything about the difference between talk of war and how it actually is; then everything follows.

I believe we are the sum of our experiences, including secondary experiences that come from books, movies, plays and our exchanges with each other. There are images in Hurt Locker that will become part of you.

The audience is consistently kept off balance. We see big name actors without the usual protections against sudden and early disappearance from the screen; this alone compounds our feeling that as an audience we are out of our element here.

This is not to say that Hurt Locker thwarts expectations from beginning to end. It enlists certain formulas and where it does it is less interesting. There are so many movie reviews. Movie Sightings tries not to be a critic (who finds shortfalls), but rather an ecstatic -- grateful for whatever a film shows us that helps explain the world. The Hurt Locker certainly does that.