Hurt locker: CSI goes to Iraq and sweats a lot
This must have been a really bad year for movies. Or maybe the Academy wanted to reward a director for making a low-budget film where normally one would have expected them to blow more than the GNP of a populous, earthquake-ravaged Caribbean island to make 90 minutes of eye candy. Or maybe they thought ‘this is the year that we finally give best picture to a woman’.
Other than that I can’t think of how this film came to win Best Picture. All my other explanations involve serious self-medication on the part of the judges.
Setting aside the oft-cited criticisms of accuracy, setting aside – for a few paragraphs at least – the value-free, context-free and analysis-free depiction of the occupation of Iraq, it’s just not at all compelling.
It’s formulaeic – there’s even the get-straight-to-the-action intro. The characters are flat – you could capture the protagonists’ personalities, pasts and actions in half a tweet. (He’s a cowboy who has a sad moment, he’s cautious, he’s the scared sidekick = 75 Characters) None of them are compelling or elicit any kind of empathy. And that’s not just because I think the occupation of Iraq is a brutal act of imperialism.
If I was the producer pitching Hurt Locker to the studio (Ã la The Player) I would have said, “It’s CSI goes to Iraq”. They match gritty, TV journalism style camera work with Disneyland plot and superhero characters.
I can see the director trying to tell a lot of different stories about Americans invading Iraq but not wanting to complicate the plot or blow the budget by bringing in a ton of other actors and characters. So she makes this one small group of soldiers do all the crazy shit that soldiers do in Iraq.
But it makes all the characters Gil Grissoms in kevlar and makes me think, “well, if they’re making that shit up, what of any of this is real?”
And what are they not telling us?
- Nothing about what the Americans are actually doing there in the first place
- Nothing about why the Iraqis might want them gone or how they might feel about them being there. Heck we never learn that Iraqis actually have names – though that might be realistic.
- Nothing about how this invasion business all ends.
Can no one make a movie about the invasion from the perspective of the Iraqis? Can Hollywood make a movie where an Iraqi adult says more than one or two lines before they’re blown up, riddled with bullets or handcuffed?
Whooh. Deep breath there, Chris.
Compare and contrast Hurt Locker with another epic Hollywood – well, HBO anyway – attempt to portray the war in Iraq: Generation Kill. Just as singularly focussed on the American soldiers. Quite limited and timid in its questioning of the motivation for and purpose of the invasion of Iraq, but at least it’s there.
It neither villifies or deifies the soldiers it portrays but it shows them – warts and all: good soldiers who have bad luck or make mistakes, bad soliders who get away with murder, victims of the poverty draft, army brats, true believers and backwoods psychopaths. Above all, they’re interesting people. No one I’d want to have coffee with, mind, but in the moment, it’s possible to identify with them.
Generation Kill critically examines the institution that is the army, the foibles of its hierarchy. No such thing happens in Hurt Locker. It’s just a bunch of guys doing their jobs.
Generation Kill also deals more thoughtfully with how soldier react to the atrocities they commit. It allows us to see how the guys with the fingers on the triggers could blur ‘deliberate’ with ‘accident’ and it allows us to see how the aforementionned army hierarchy ensures that despite knowing they’ve just killed an unarmed civilian, and despite it tearing them up inside, the soldiers will pretend nothing happened and not betray their comrade.
If you can stand a cinematic depiction of an unjust war (I wanted to know how the eff is this all humanly possible and how do they justify it to us and to each other) watch Generation Kill. It’s a lot longer, but when you’re done, you won’t feel slimy or worry that Carl Rove has colonized part of your brain.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Although I wanted it to be the year where they finally give an award to a Tarantino.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:00 am
I went in thinknig it was a movie about the Iraq war, but realized it's actually a superhero movie. I do give Bigelow credit for making a weak script watchable.
March 9th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
“nothing about how this invasion business all ends.” that would the answer to the billion dollar question, wouldn’t it?
Haven’t seen the movie, but you have just summed up why I don’t want to. Great post.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Hi Chris. This is Lesley’s fella Ben. Enjoyed your review.
“Can no one make a movie about the invasion from the perspective of the Iraqis? Can Hollywood make a movie where an Iraqi adult says more than one or two lines before they’re blown up, riddled with bullets or handcuffed?”
This is the crux of it for me. I’m just sick of Western soldiers being the privileged cinematic subject, the only ones who live and breathe in war. At this point I don’t care if they’re portrayed as swaggering G.I. Joes or as fully complicated, fully motivated human beings. I don’t care to see them portrayed at all. Just get them out of frame and let someone else in.
Our fighting boys and their hardness, and their frailty, and their camaraderie, and their high school sweet-hearts waiting for them, and their bittersweet homecomings, and their PTSD, and their lost innocence. Enough already. It’s the same (Oscar-winning) story and when it ends we know nothing, we have learned nothing, about the people and cultures and histories we have altered.