The Hurt Locker Movie Review

The Hurt Locker is a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, set in the Iraq war. The film is about three men who makeup an explosives ordinance team; Staff Sargent Matthew Thompson (Guy Pearce), Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). In the beginning, a bomb disposal goes bad and Sargent Matthew Thompson is killed by the blast, Eldridge blames himself for his friend’s death because he had the chance to shoot the bomber, but he was too scared and so his friend died. The main character Sargent First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) takes up the empty spot on the bomb crew. James is a wildman, he does his job dangerously, while diffusing a car bomb, and he took off his bomb suit because he wanted to “die comfortably”. James does not work well with his team, in one case he took off his headset so his team leader could not communicate with him while defusing a bomb. This movie shows the real fear of war and how things don’t always turn out good. Eldridge invites his commander out to the field to see what really goes on; this ends up in the commander being killed by a bomb and leaves Eldridge feeling like it was his fault.

This movie doesn’t follow a normal story plot, it is just random events. The movie was made to show the pain, suffering, and danger of real war, it has no plot structure. The acting in this movie was spectacular, all of the actors really pulled off their character. The movie had great directing, editing, and special effects. It was very suspenseful, the music was great, and it had a great theme to it. This movie was made simply to show what war is really like, and I think it did a great job at that. I think it reached its target market very well, anyone who wants a very realistic war action movie would be satisfied with this film.

James began a friendship with a young Iraqi boy who sells DVDs near the camp, they play soccer together. In one scene, James finds the boy’s dead body in a bomb warehouse. The body is cut down the middle and an explosive was placed inside him to be used as a “body bomb”. James feels like it was his duty to make sure his friend got a proper burial. So he opens the body and removed the bomb, then carried the body out. The next day, the boy walks up and asks him to play soccer. James is angry because that body wasn’t really his friend, and he went through that horrible experience for nothing.

One major scene in this movie is when they are under fire in the desert. They were shooting snipers back and forth with two enemies. Eldridge saw a man approaching the group from behind, he was afraid to shoot back, but remembering his friend’s death from the beginning of the movie he decides to shoot. He killed that man but he possibly saved his teams life this time.