Glancing back at The Hurt Locker

With The Hurt Locker winning the big prize recently, and consequently finding its way into conversations more often than not, it seems like an opportune time to take a second look at the film. Admittedly, I’ll be doing this without an actual second viewing, so I apologize if things seem built on generalities instead of specificities.

To begin with the direction, the film is wired for action and she's done a thorough job. It’s solid to the point where you can feel the metallic vibrations from the explosions in your bones, and live in that environment at least as much as any movie before. It is not the kind of film that resonates with completion, with rightness, with that irrefutable stamp of the Hollywood arc and emotional push points. Instead, it feels taut, like sinew over bone, or a film budget for a female director. And to get this out of the way now, that Oscar was vicariously very satisfying, because while Kathryn Bigelow may not have been head and shoulders above the competition, she had a fierce hairsbreadth of a lead that she earned beyond a doubt. That she is intelligent and adult, a professional and an artist both in her interviews doesn’t hurt either.

It is topical, but to its credit the film is neither polemical nor pedantic, maybe just slightly juvenile in its message in the way action films tend to be (the message: blowing shit up is cool.) That’s not meant as a denigration, just as a counterargument to those who say the lasting impression left by the explosions is cautionary. The Hurt Locker is not unsophisticated in its methods or even its conclusions, but it’s telling that the film’s final image is to adrenaline-pumping hard rock music with our hero walking into the desert, about as classic an image of badassery as you can get.

It’s an action movie, pure and simple, which strangely, makes it one of the best treatments of a tricky topic that I’ve seen. It knows its aims and achieves them squarely, shooting neither too high nor too low, and in that sense it is a classic genre film, working within a known context. And little about the film pushes the boundaries—that’s not what it’s about—but like its protagonist, does a single job with unerring and unsettling efficiency. There’s something extremely satisfying, and worthy, about that kind of ethos, a film and a director who strangely favor competence over pretension.

And that is perhaps part of the reason why it was nice to see Bigelow get the Oscar, because it wasn’t just a validation but a mandate: go do more. Although I perhaps wasn’t quite as enamored with this film as many of the critics seem to be (though I did like it), I’ll be lining up to see her next movie. And one small part of me wonders what it would have been like if Kathryn Bigelow had helmed Avatar, not that it ever would have happened, or that she even would have wanted to. But a person can dream about what a movie that would have been.