I can't believe there's not been a thread on this, but that's what search/advanced search are telling me, so feel free to shout this down and redirect me.

It's going to win award after award, and rightly so-I'd rather they rewarded such a film (aesthetically) than just give Avatar all the gongs cos it made money.

However..., I was rather uncomfortable by/at the end of the film when I saw it the other week.

Not just because of what the character does, but the sense that seeing the film thru their eyes made all Iraqis into 'the other/the enemy'. Apart from the kid. But then even John Wayne befriended a Vietnamese kid in Green Berets.


In the end I began to feel that we/the film had been 'embedded' with the bomb squad for 2 hours (in a gripping and brilliantly filmed way, I hasten to add) and that it's not the best place from which to view the situation, and is indeed likely to lead to the wrong conclusions about it.

What did youse think?

Old sparsely populated thread

My thoughts copied from there:
I just watched it there. It is very good. The battle action sequences were top notch. The camera angles were fantastic, they really conveyed how much danger and scope for snipers there was. The suspense was extraordinary, although I can't think of an occupation more likely to be suspenseful than a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq.

Some slight mis-steps in portraying how the soldiers deal with bottling up their emotions and analysing the risks in their profession. I thought the "Beckham" situation was needlessly heart-tugging. The best film regarding the Iraq war that I've seen so far.

I had the same reservations upon seeing it. The Iraqis being relegated to little more than establishing shots of babbering locals and shifty-eyed bomb experts, in the first part of the film, rankles and one of the few criticisms that can be fairly levelled at the movie is its unwillingness to explore the political background to the story and instead heads straight on into depicting the horror/boredom of military life in a war zone.

But then again, it's a question of where you stand on what a film-maker's responsibilities are when it comes to filming a story with a heavy basis in fact. The Hurt Locker didn't set out to be an exploration of the morality of the Iraq War. Theoretically it could have been set in any conflict from the past four, five decades and would still have "worked" as a film. It is concerned with examining the human response to extreme pressure in a hostile environment and how some are unreservedly addicted to the thrill it provides. On that level, I think it succeeds immensely.

I think the unevenness of viewpoint is essential to create the tension. These people are up against an unseen enemy. The film is about the soldiers - clearly not about the conflict in a wider sense, or about the justification for being there, or even how their presence affects the local population. It's how they deal with extreme danger.

First time I've actually seen Kathryn Bigelow (at the BAFTAs). She's very beautiful.

I've just noticed that amongst the google ads on this thread is one for "lockers and more lockers."

I hesitate to think what's on the "Dick van Dyke's Dad's dead" thread.

I certainly take on board a lot of the points made in response, and I was trying to establish that I actually think it's a really impressive film in all sorts of ways.

I agree with CV:

It is concerned with examining the human response to extreme pressure in a hostile environment and how some are unreservedly addicted to the thrill it provides. On that level, I think it succeeds immensely.

But to erwin's
not about the conflict in a wider sense, or about the justification for being there

I'd say that the ending/his choice could certainly be read as a vindication (if not a justification): look at our boys, so dedicated are they that they'll even (do the thing I won't describe for risk of spoilering).

*** possible spoiler ***


But his decision has nothing to do with 'dedication', does it, Felicity? More to do with his perverse addiction. And so we're back to a portrayal of the human factor again, rather than a comment on the bigger picture.

First time I've actually seen Kathryn Bigelow (at the BAFTAs). She's very beautiful.

She looks identical to Liz Hurley. It's very confusing.

First time I've actually seen Kathryn Bigelow (at the BAFTAs). She's very beautiful.
She has unnaturally big arms though. Not fat arms by any stretch of the imagination. Just big.
Sort of like she has the arms of a male basketball player.

Hmmm ... didn't notice that. A potential Seinfeld-esque stumbling block.

Must be lugging camera equipment around all the time.

Apologies for the piousness but can we get back to discussing her work? This digression doesn't happen when we're discussing any male film director.

Can't say I've ever seen any of it. I just happened to notice her arms at the Baftas. Rest assured I'd have made a similar comment about any unusualness in a male director too.

I tend to agree with Erwin's point-of-view. Watched the movie last night, and I thought that only seeing things through the Americans' eyes was crucial to building the suspense. And obviously people with different thoughts on the war could read the movie differently, but even an anti-war American like myself could watch it and still be invested in the characters and their situation.

I didn't think it was that great overall, though--I liked it technically, but I didn't think there was much depth to the characters, though. But on the other hand, I liked that it just dropped you in to the story and left you to figure things out. There was no scene were one of the main characters explained to someone else the dangers of dismantling a bomb, or anything like that. But all in all, I felt kind of empty after finishing it.

I rented the DVD at the weekend. Thought it was well shot, the tension was built up really well and the acting excellent. Some of the things I didn't like were that some of the characters just seem to be beyong parody. The man addicted to war, the nervous novice who appears never to have shot at anyone before. Maybe i'm being a bit too harsh.

*SPOILERS*



Couple of other things I didn't like, the bit after they discover the body of 'Beckham', and main guy goes on a little crusade as to who was behind it really pissed me off. I felt for a moment it was the real 'jump the shark' moment. Similarly when the team go off on their own to trace the insurgents, I just felt it went a little too far, and I agree with what Veterans have said regarding that.

Slavoj Žižek's take on it, from the LRB blog.

In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.

I thought Jarhead was better. Different war, I know, but better film and didn't get any Oscars.

TMA wrote:

Slavoj Žižek's take on it, from the LRB blog.

In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there


But why question, Slavoj Žižek? That's not the point of the film. Questioning is for another film, and/or Michael Moore.

It's a film about extreme situations, and how human beings (men in this case) deal with them (or not). It could have been about a bomb disposal unit in London, or Madrid. In this case the conflict in Iraq gives a naturalistic and topical context for the stress. That's all.

seems a bit harsh to criticise a movie for telling a story from the point of view of its main characters. it's not bigelow's responsibility to educate people about the rights and wrongs of the wider situation in iraq. surely her aim is to communicate a sense of the soldiers' experience there.

the movie was a set of stock characters (even an effete psychiatrist) going through some brilliantly-executed set-pieces. i liked the breakfast cereal scene towards the end. but it didn't really have much to say and i found it faded quickly from the memory. i wasn't the world's biggest fan of generation kill but it gave you a little more to chew on.

Slavoj Zizek talking about how The Hurt Lucker and Lebanon amongst others hide the horrors of war.

A Soft Focus on War
How Hollywood hides the horrors of war.
By Slavoj Žižek

When Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker won all the big Oscars over James Cameron’s Avatar, the victory was perceived as a good sign of the state of things in Hollywood: A modest production meant for independent festivals clearly overran a superproduction whose technical brilliance cannot cover up the flat simplicity of its story. Did this mean that Hollywood is not just a blockbuster machine, but still knows how to appreciate marginal creative efforts? Maybe—but that’s a big maybe.

For all its mystifications, Avatar clearly sides with those who oppose the global Military-Industrial Complex, portraying the superpower army as a force of brutal destruction serving big corporate interests. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, presents the U.S. Army in a way that is much more finely attuned to its own public image in our time of humanitarian interventions and militaristic pacifism.

The film largely ignores the big debate about the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals of ordinary soldiers who are forced to deal with danger and destruction. In pseudo-documentary style, it tells the story—or rather, presents a series of vignettes—of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad and their potentially deadly work of disarming planted bombs. This choice is deeply symptomatic: Although soldiers, they do not kill, but daily risk their lives dismantling terrorist bombs that are destined to kill civilians. Can there be anything more sympathetic to our liberal sensibilities? Are our armies in the ongoing War on Terror (aka The Long War), even when they bomb and destroy, ultimately not just like EOD squads, patiently dismantling terrorist networks in order to make the lives of civilians safer?

But there is more to the film. The Hurt Locker brought to Hollywood the trend that accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war, Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon.

Lebanon draws on Maoz’s own memories as a young soldier, rendering the war’s fear and claustrophobia by shooting most of the action from inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched in a tank to “mop up” enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli air force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, Yoav Donat, the actor who plays the soldier Maoz from a quarter of a century ago, said: “This is not a movie that makes you think ‘I’ve just been to a movie.’ This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.” In a similar way, Waltz With Bashir, renders the horrors of the 1982 conflict from the point of view of Israeli soldiers.

Maoz said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through. “The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon War is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.” This is ideology at its purest: The re-focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict: What was the Israeli army doing deep in Lebanon? Such a “humanization” thus serves to obfuscate the key point: the need for a ruthless analysis of what we are doing in our political-military activity and what is at stake. Our political-military struggles are not an opaque history that brutally disrupts our intimate personal lives—they are something in which we fully participate.

More generally, such a “humanization” of the soldier (in the direction of the proverbial wisdom “it is human to err”) is a key constituent of the ideological (self-)presentation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The Israeli media loves to dwell on the imperfections and psychic traumas of Israeli soldiers, presenting them neither as perfect military machines nor as super-human heroes, but as ordinary people who, caught into the traumas of history and warfare, commit errors and can get lost as all normal people can.

For example, in January 2003, the IDF demolished the house of the family of a suspected terrorist. They did it with accentuated kindness, even helping the family to move the furniture out before destroying the house with a bulldozer. A similar incident was reported a little bit earlier in the Israeli press. When an Israeli soldier was searching a Palestinian house for suspects, the mother of the family called her daughter by her name in order to calm her down, and the surprised soldier learned that the frightened girl’s name was the same as his own daughter’s. In a sentimental upsurge, he pulled out his wallet and showed her picture to the Palestinian mother.

It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy: The notion that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment. The only proper reply of the mother should be to demand that the soldier address this question: “If you really are human like me, why are you doing what you are doing now?” The soldier can then only take refuge in reified duty: “I don’t like it, but these are my orders,” thus avoiding any responsibility for his actions.

The message of such humanization is to emphasize the gap between the person’s complex reality and the role they are forced—against their true nature—to play. “In my family, the military is not genetic,” says one of the interviewed soldiers who is surprised to find himself a career officer, in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the IDF, Tsahal.

And this brings us back to The Hurt Locker. Its depiction of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from sentimental celebrations of the U.S. Army’s humanitarian role, like in John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should always bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Locker obfuscates and thus renders acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: We are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.