The Hurt Locker

We will be screening The Hurt Locker on Thursday 4th November.  My notes are as follows:

The Hurt Locker


USA 2008 (131 minutes)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner and Ralph Fiennes

Nominations and Awards

• Won six Oscars including Best Film, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal)

• Won five BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director Kathryn (Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

• A further 68 wins and 47 nominations

The film is set in and around Baghdad in 2004 and follows the final 38 days of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal squad.

The script is by Mark Boal, a freelance journalist and scriptwriter who was embedded with an America bomb disposal squad in Iraq for two weeks.  Boal turned his experiences into a fictional reworking of real events and explained his objective in writing the script:

"The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

Bigelow, who had previously worked with Boal when she turned one of his articles into a short-lived TV series, expanded on this: she aimed to explore “the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes forward [sic] what everybody else is running from.”

Most of the serious films that Hollywood had previously produced about Iraq such as Syriana (2005), Lion for Lambs (2007) and Rendition (2007) had been liberal-patriot multi-stranded stories set in Washington, the Middle East and elsewhere with big name stars in the leading roles. For The Hurt Locker, in addition to sole location of Baghdad and the surrounding area (but filmed in the sweltering heat of Jordan and Kuwait) Bigelow deliberately made a point of casting relatively unknown actors in the leading roles as “it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability”.

The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 where it received a ten minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It received many other festival screenings around the world but distributors were reluctant to buy it for screening in the US as previous films about the Iraq War had performed badly at the box office. The film eventually opened in the US in June 2009 in a few cinemas, and as such became eligible for consideration for the 2010 Oscars. Subsequently it was screened in more than 500 cinemas and received nine Oscar nominations and won six, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win this award.