OK, so I waited until after the Academy Awards to see The Hurt Locker. I was ambivalent about seeing this film, or any film about Iraq for some reason, and judging by the box office of every movie made about the conflict, I guess I'm not alone.
But -- Damn! Best Picture, huh? OK, I'll plop down a couple of bucks at the video store and see what the fuss is all about.
What I got was a pretty average war movie. Pretty average war movies rarely depict war accurately, sacrificing veracity for drama, and Hurt Locker is no exception. This is too bad, because the basic premise that war can be a drug is valid, though nothing new to either books or cinema. (Find a copy of The War Lover, either in print or on film with Steve McQueen to see what I mean.)
But the continual inaccuracies detract so much from the film that it knocks what otherwise could be a pretty suspenseful movie into the "WTF" category over and over and over again.
Much has been made of the central trio of protagonists going it alone -- modern warfare just doesn't work that way. What, no radios? Statements like "Hey, let's split up" -- ??? Come on.
Where they really lost me is when the team is somehow are out in the middle of the desert in their Humvee (alone) and come across what turn out to be either coalition special forces for some sort of rent-a-warrior team herding a group of captured bag guys. They all get in a firefight with a bunch of militants 850 meters away in a concrete block building. One of the good guys hops up on the Humvee and starts plastering the building with .50 caliber machine gun fire. You have any idea what a .50 caliber bullet does to a concrete block? A sledge hammer has nothing on a .50 hitting a block -- it will shatter in a dozen pieces. The inside of that building would be a serious cluster fuck of flying concrete and steel.
But, no, apparently our good guy can't hit squat, because he's promptly taken down by a single round from an AK-47 from the building. Nice shot, dude -- how did you manage to zero your crap rifle and calmly squeeze off a round, and hit a target 850 meters away while that block building is exploding all around you?
One of the team gets all squeamish about getting ammo out of a dead man's pouch. He retrieves just one magazine. You'd think that A) he'd grab everything he could find, and B) he wouldn't be all upset by the blood, having been tripping over blown up people for the past ten months. Guess it's just more artistic license.
Then, our hero, firing a big, heavy, Barrett .50 caliber rifle, can't seem to hit a motionless target, until he pulls off a one-in-a-million shot, hitting a running insurgent at 850 meters. Uh-huh.
Oh, there's lots more to make people groan, like when our hero goes rogue and searches for a bad guy alone, at night, in the city, (!?!) and then nearly gets shot as he tries to reenter his base.
Oh, and in another scene, why would Mr. Bad Guy put the wires to hook up his bomb only about ten feet from the bomb itself, when he could have run the wires to a safe location? It must be so he can let our hero watch him drop his 9-volt battery in defeat. Please...
I suppose director Kathryn Bigelow figured that if filmmakers got away with such nonsense in all the Vietnam movies we were raised on (think Apocalypse Now) well, why not? Well, Vietnam, being a fucked up mess from every one's perspective, and it being the 1960's (say no more) lended itself to such broad-brush film making. America has changed; the face of war has changed; cinema has changed, but apparently neither Bigelow or the Academy notices or cares.
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