The Hurt Locker
(here you can watch the whole movie on youTube)
Everybody's asking what it means, The Hurt Locker. Well, the Urban Dictionary gives you some leads; here in the movie it's that for the GI's in Iraq an explosion sends you to The Hurt Locker, period.
An explosion produced by a bomb placed anywhere: under an amount of debris, inside the corpse of a kid, on the chest of a suicide bomber, or on the chest of an innocent, chosen by his fellows to be a human bomb.
Actually, for a GI in Baghdad, any Iraqi can send you to The Hurt Locker: they seem to you all alike, they look at you with some kind of bad curiosity, they don't understand your English (or they pretend to not understand), and sometimes they have a cell in hand, that can be a remote.
That's your fate, to move there, on the streets of Baghdad, surrounded by hundreds of unknown Iraqis who just look at you, and you never know which of them has a remote in hand; if you're lucky, you return home, where the wife does not understand anything that's in your soul, she just needs you home to be a man there, and the kid doesn't know you, he was born after you left, and you start to realize that you just need to get back to Baghdad, because you are addicted to war, only gambling with death makes sense to you any more, all the rest is bullshit.
And so, The Hurt Locker means also what you hide in your most inner, the failure you are for your wife and kid, and the terrible fear that you are no more good for normality, only for this stupid game of playing every moment the ultimate experience.
A great war movie, this Hurt Locker: an elite unit of three soldiers, who have to find and deactivate bombs on the streets of Baghdad, surrounded by hundreds of unknown eyes, hostile eyes, all eyes alike, unknown walls, hostile walls, all walls alike.
Actually it's a great anti-war movie, because you can say anything: that these boys are heroes (and they are), that nobody invited them in a foreign country (that's true), and many other things; what matters is the proximity of The Hurt Locker, everything else is blah-blah.
(Filmofilia)
Labels: The Hurt Locker
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
5:27 PM
1 Comments:
I saw the movie tonight. I have one observation to your comments - I believe that there is a clear difference made in the film between the main character (bomb expert James) and the rest of the soldiers of the team. It's only James who is intoxicated with the drug of war, the other soldiers are just the normal people - young boys sent to perform their duty in a place that is alien and hostile, that they do not understand and that hates them. The Israeli films 'Beaufort' and 'Lebanon' caught before 'Hurt Locker' exactly the same feeling of fear and loneliness of the human being faced with the violence and absurdity of war. It is only James who walks defiantly towards the deadly target and plays again and again dice games with fate. He is a victim of war nevertheless and the message of the film is indeed anti-war, but I believe that the intent is to present him as the exception rather than the rule.
By
Dan Romascanu, at 5:45 PM
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