But "The Hurt Locker" is exceptional because it's the Iraq-est of the Iraq war movies to date. It touches on what is unique about this particular conflict - that it's fought, to a noteworthy extent, by volunteer men and women who want to be there, who re-enlist (sometimes missing an arm or leg) to be with their "warrior buddies."
Most of our modern war movies have a common element, one that links material as different as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Platoon." It's the idea of the citizen soldier, the Ordinary Joe who's plucked via conscription from his civilian life and dumped on the front lines, where he endures with the thought of returning to his workaday life.
The volunteer army and the long-running Iraq conflict has produced another kind of soldier. One who goes to the front lines and finds a home, a sense of purpose and meaning missing in civilian life.
We meet him in "The Hurt Locker."
He's Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist Sgt. James, played in what is probably a career-making performance by Jeremy Renner.
James has an uncanny proficiency, a gift, for defusing live bombs. And something else - a desire to do it, one that begets a fearlessness that frightens his colleagues (who work within the blast radius) because it seems to depart from prudence.
Director Kathyrn Bigelow has a pulp-action background ("Near Dark," "Point Break") and she makes the movie's many bomb-defusing sequences exciting. Early scenes establish the missions as deadly beyond question, and subsequent defusings have a remarkable tension.
You can't make a thought-provoking war movie unless you bring the war to life, and Bigelow uses her visual chops to do just that. The movie's poster references the best scene - James defuses a shell, breaths a sigh of relief, then pulls up a connecting wire to reveal a spider-web of wired shells all around. You realize his work's just begun.
A metaphor for the Iraq war itself? I don't know. But I know a brilliant sequence when I see one.
