The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker's script (written by Mark Boal) skillfully brings the Iraq war to life. Somehow, it manages to calmly present snapshots of 39 days of a bomb squad's Iraq rotation. We aren't bombarded with left-wing or right-wing propaganda regarding whether or not the war is justified. Instead, we simply observe a group of soldiers as they go about their business of warring, doing their best to pacify the country. In fact, in one scene two soldiers (Jeremy Renner as SSG William James and Anthony Mackie as Sgt. JT Sanborn) discuss why they're fighting and neither of them can come up with an answer. And no direct answers are provided, although at least two collaborating viewpoints are established, one suggesting that war is a drug and participants are addicted, another, that soldiers defuse bombs to save children. Altruism or expediency?, probably a combination of both considering how psychologically complicated things must become after you've been fighting for awhile. Answers: there are no answers but there is a war and there are people fighting it. Director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) objectively displays this fact and gives us enough credit to come to personnel conclusions of our own.