A jarring dose of reality

If there is one thing soldiers value more than anything else, it's not love or glory, but respect. The brooding, muscular new Iraq war film by Kathyrn Bigelow (Mission Zero) demands respect, and it earns it in spades. Like Apocalypse Now, you can leave The Hurt Locker, but it will never leave you.

From the first smoldering frame to the last, Bigelow manages to squeeze every ounce of soggy liberalism out of the Iraq war movie sub-genre by abandoning rhetoric and shooting straight for the fission inherent in a meeting between man, bomb and society.

In this case, the men are members of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad, an elite section of the Army charged with discharging crude, yet potent and deadly, IEDs. The bombs are made out of whatever materials insurgents can find. Archaic artillery shells, cell phones and a young boy's body - nothing is off limits, and the EOD is tasked to brave them all.

The enemy is largely faceless. We see what they do and how they do it, but rarely who does it. This reflects the muddled, hazy fog of the war screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah) saw and felt firsthand. Our protagonists, however, are rendered to such a jarring degree of psychological detail that they are left fighting, sweating and dying in the mind long after the screen goes black.

Take a particularly striking sequence in which the film's chief characters, Staff Sgt. William James (a breakout Jeremy Renner, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, Notorious), engage in seemingly lighthearted hand-to-hand combat back in their barracks.

The context is rich and hangs in the air around the soldiers. James is a replacement for Sanborn's slain colleague and establishes himself immediately in the squad with a daring and ill-advised IED defusing. He is later commended by a superior officer as a "wild man," brazenly venturing into depths few have ever survived.

Sanborn, suspicious of James's high-wire antics, wishes to stop James from completely encroaching on his turf so Sanborn can simply do his time and get out. These conflicts, fears and suspicions coalesce to form a smoky sense of dread expressed in every punch to the gut, swig of cheap alcohol and sudden wrestle to the ground.

Eventually, James pins Sanborn to the floor and pretends to ride him while losing self-control and laughing with abandon. In a fraction of a bullet-quick moment, Sanborn flips James and puts a knife to his throat. They have to be separated.

In a lesser film (the MTV-infused Stop-Loss comes to mind), this fragile fulcrum between camaraderie and near-deadly aggression, masculine bonding and chest-thumping power struggles, would be handled with an inept jump cut.

Bigelow's dipping, intimate handheld camera does not miss a moment of the struggle. Although the frame is bathed in shadows and the faded-yellow hues of poor lighting, Bigelow ensures that gripping moments too close for comfort arrive out of the chaos.

Her images - shot in a mix of vivid 16 mm film and hard, rough high-definition video - thankfully bear little resemblance to the nostalgic sketches of Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan and Francis Ford Coppola's sweeping tracking shots in Apocalypse Now. The Iraq war is not a war for glory, aesthetic or otherwise. It is a small, bitter struggle, played out in trapped, sweltering streets with the lives of women and children at risk - not the grand beaches of Normandy.

Likewise, Renner does well to avoid the towering proclamations of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now or soothing decency and empathy projected by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan.

Again, this war is not about heroism and nobility. It is a war of post-traumatic stress disorder and choking dust, not despotic reigns in the heart of the jungle or valiant struggles against pure evil. Renner's James is a man clearly addicted to war, and he plays him at his ambiguous best. He looks like he would snort gun powder on a dare and then do it again to just prove he could.

One feels for directors attempting to make an Iraq war movie after The Hurt Locker. Everything from this point forward is comparable to Platoon at best. This film is not meant to convince - it's meant to bruise.

And for a little more than two hours, you too can feel the hurt.

vmain13@umd.edu

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Stars