C'mon baby make it hurt so good

Why is it when director Michael Bay makes movies about masculinity (Bad Boys, The Rock, Transformers etc) he ends up degrading women and assaulting the senses? Whereas when Kathryn Bigelow broaches the subject, despite not having a penis, she is able to bring a sense of understanding and finesse.

In her latest film Bigelow paints a portrait of the military's most unrecognized heroes; the technicians of the bomb squad. The Hurt Locker chronicles the lives of three members of the Army's elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad as they battle insurgents and each other to seek out and disarm a wave of roadside bombs on the streets of Baghdad.

The character set-up is basic; Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is the new cocky-but-brilliant bomb disarmer who disrupts the comfortable group dynamic with his rogue methods. Yet it is the extraordinary circumstances these men find themselves in and Bigelow's masterful direction that propel the story forward.

Bigelow doesn't seem too far removed from her Point Break days in the bromance between the soldiers and masculine-fuelled rivalry, yet the overindulgent cheesiness that plagued her previous films is replaced with raw emotion. Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders help build the suspense with a modest score that surges forward at the crucial moments, before slipping into the background when needed.
Elevated by an Oscar-nominated performance from Renner (above), keep an eye out for fleeting cameos from the likes of Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes. Not to mention the superb work of location scouts and set decorators to recreate war-torn Iraq in Amman, Jordan.

Another strong point is the story, written by freelance journalist and Playboy contributor Mark Boal. Based on his accounts as a journalist embedded with an American bomb squad in the Iraq war, Bigelow was already familiar with his work and adapted one of his previous articles into television series The Inside. The pair kept in touch about his experiences and he eventually moulded them into a fictional retelling of real events. Wanting to show the soldiers experiences beyond “what you see on CNN” Boal certainly achieves that, with the script equaling his brilliant work on 2007's The Valley Of Elah.

It is easy to pigeon-hole The Hurt Locker as a war drama, which it is, but it is also a bad-ass action film that transcends the superficiality of the genre by exploring the reactions of soldiers to extremely violent and traumatic situations. For every superbly choreographed action-sequence, there is a slow-motion shot of a bomb disintegrating the surrounding landscape in a beautiful, almost dreamlike way. Mixed in with the struggles of the central characters are close-up's of the war-ravaged faces of Iraqi civilians or a feral cat hopping through the rubbish on the streets.

Bigelow delivers her message in small, meaningful packages throughout the film building to a finished product that serves as one of the best dramatizations of the Iraq war.

The Hurt Locker is leading the 2010 Oscar race with Avatar, both with nine nominations.

It is released in metropolitan cinemas this Thursday, February 18 and regional cinemas next Thursday, February 25.