Logan Blain

The Hurt Locker: Thriller or Moralization?

The film The Hurt Locker is a movie that focuses on combat in Iraq and more specifically on explosives. Many actual soldiers disagree with this movie and claim that it is not accurate, but this is to be expected from a Hollywood production. To a viewer who has never experienced war first-hand this movie is both thrilling and informative. It is hard to say how accurate the movie is in terms of what it was really like in Iraq because Hollywood has to make the movie interesting to make money, but I believe there are many aspects of the movie that are true in war. This movie is very suspenseful but I would think that it is suspenseful not knowing if the merchant behind the vendor has a detonator or not. There are many times in the movie where you are on the edge of your seat anticipating what’s going to happen next, which is thrilling yet true in the context of the film. Putting yourself in the shoes of the bomb squad, any of the positions from the man in the back watching windows to the diffuser himself are all very important and each hold their own worth.

The Hurt Locker is a thriller due to it’s action-packed plot and suspenseful scenarios, yet I believe it provides more value in the truths that it reveals to us through its depiction of combat in this war. The film puts the viewer into the shoes of an American soldier fighting in Iraq. The movie really emphasizes how the soldiers cannot be too careful. Anything could be an IED therefore, they don’t underestimate anyone. For example, James interacts with a young Iraqi boy he plays soccer with him and buys DVDs from him. At first James sees nothing wrong with him selling DVDs, then he begins to rouse the suspicion that the DVD merchant might be giving away the positions of soldiers. This is a good assumption that James made but turned out the DVDs were not giving away their positions.

Not only does this movie portray what it is like to fight on Iraqi soil, it also explores the mental state of the characters during the war. Referring back to James again, he deals with terrors and anxiety of war through an adrenaline rush. He is the bomb diffuser, he loves the rush that diffusing a bomb gives him. James keeps a part from each rig that he diffuses in a box under his bed. James’s way of coping with death and war is a head-on approach, he does not require the backup of his fellow soldiers rather he wants to do it all himself. When James is off duty he drinks to forget about the terrors that haunt him from the things he encounters in combat. This is a common way that soldiers cope with combat.

Another reason I give this film so much credibility in its sufficiency of depicting combat and a soldier’s struggles is because, even though James is so tough mentally, he too has a breaking point. We see James’s breaking point when he discovers a young boy’s mutilated body which he believes to be the boy that he has been interacting with. Up until this point in the movie James has assessed every bomb situation very calmly without any apparent fears. We now he encounters something that is not a part of his every job (diffusing) he is presented with a different situation. At first, James’s solution is to place charges on the body and blow it up, then he changes his mind and opens up the body, removes the bombs, and carries the body with him. James is mentally stable after diffusing literally hundreds of bombs but this one bomb defines his collapse. I believe this was a good thing to include in James’s character because after all, no one is going to endure war without any long-lasting effects. While The Hurt Locker is a thrilling movie, it holds more truth through it’s portrayal of combat and mental combat of a soldier. The movie covers what it is like on the battlefield all the way to the other end of the spectrum to what it is like after the war is over.