Saw the trailer for this the other night when we went to see Mesrine pt 1, and it looked superb.
Kathryn Bigelow directs this story about a bomb disposal squad in Iraq. Reviews are excellent.
New York Times- If “The Hurt Locker” is not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car. The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. Ms. Bigelow, whose body of work (including “Point Break,” “Blue Steel,” “Strange Days” and “K-19: The Widowmaker”) has been uneven but never uninteresting, has an almost uncanny understanding of the circuitry that connects eyes, ears, nerves and brain. She is one of the few directors for whom action-movie-making and the cinema of ideas are synonymous. You may emerge from “The Hurt Locker” shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking.
Time magazine: The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes.
The LA Times: "The Hurt Locker" has the killer impact of the explosive devices that are the heart of its plot: It simply blows you apart and doesn't bother putting you back together again. Overwhelmingly tense, overflowing with crackling verisimilitude, it's both the film about the war in Iraq that we've been waiting for and the kind of unqualified triumph that's been long expected from director Kathryn Bigelow...One of the most unexpected things about "The Hurt Locker" is that, unlike many war films, it is not interested in having you choose sides in this debate. In fact, it reveals unlooked-for aspects of all the characters, especially James, like the sergeant's playfulness with a young Iraqi boy (Christopher Sayegh) who calls himself Beckham and says things like "I hook you up." Renner handles all sides of his surprisingly complex character beautifully, in a performance so good it feels like a gift.
For all its realism, "The Hurt Locker" is also a stylized film that deals in the quality of myth. While documentaries have shown that the reality of Iraq is incendiary combat interspersed with tedious down time, this film largely does without the down time, placing us in such a rapid-fire sequence of high-octane situations that we never ever have a chance to catch our breath.
Finally, almost without our realizing it, "The Hurt Locker" asks difficult questions about heroism's costs and demands, about what war does to soldiers, and about damage that may be impossible to rectify or repair.
The film starts with a celebrated quote from the book "War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" by Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." It's easy to understand this thought intellectually, but by the time this remarkable film comes to an end, we feel it in our souls.
98% on Rotten Tomatoes, 94 on Metacritic, if such things tickle your whatnot. I'm a big David Morse fan, so that just seals it for me...
