Explosive results

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker
explores the incredibly tense world of
military bomb squads

SMARTS, BRAVERY AND SHEER CRAZINESS: Jeremy Renner

by MARK SLUTSKY

It’s hard to imagine work more stressful, more psychologically punishing, than that performed by members of the U.S. Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal units in Iraq. Working in any bomb squad anywhere would, of course, be a hell of a thing. But, charged with identifying and defusing IEDs (improvised explosive devices) placed by the insurgency, EOD unit members must work in incredibly hot, tense conditions in the middle of a warzone. Their targets are hardly obvious: an IED can be hidden as a piece of trash, or inside a corpse, or in the trunk of a car.

It takes a special breed of smarts, bravery and sheer craziness to do this kind of work. The people who do—and the toll it takes on them—are the subjects of The Hurt Locker, an incredibly suspenseful film from veteran director Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Blue Steel). It’s a true return to form for Bigelow, who shows her chops here. The film follows a three-man EOD unit headed by new guy William James (Jeremy Renner) after the previous leader dies in an explosion. Renner appears at first like a wild card, a reckless cowboy type, but it quickly becomes clear that his wild personality is perhaps the only sane response to a life where he’s in constant danger—a danger that has become addictive.

It’s an intense and gripping film with some white-knuckle set pieces, filmed with great restraint (no ticking timers or “what wire do I cut?” scenes here), interwoven with more personal, emotional moments. Speaking to the Mirror at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Bigelow says, “I thought it was important for the audience, if you’re going to look at what they do—which I had a feeling would be incredibly, incredibly tense—that you didn’t have to overlay that in any way cinematically. My job was, I think, to get out of the way of that material to a certain extent. It was already so freighted with so much gravitas that you really had to pierce that tension a bit for the audience and let some of that come out so that they can breathe and be able to withstand the epic nature of what these men do.

RAWNESS AND RESTRAINT: Bigelow

“We tried to find that rhythm, to look at the macrocosm and the microcosm, and the sort of emotional engine at the heart of it. For me, it’s all about character, and character as described through actions. The other thing is, it’s another day at the office. You go out, simply have the most dangerous job in the world and then you go to bed—and then you wake up and you still have the most dangerous job in the world! So there’s a kind of ebb and flow to that—providing you survive.”

And threats to their survival are, unsurprisingly, multifarious. Interestingly enough, though, the bombs themselves are often the least dangerous element in the field. “These guys are so well-trained that the last thing they’re really worrying about is the IED that they’re squatting over,” says Renner, who hung out with actual EOD guys to research the role. “They’re not worried about that. They’re going to handle that. They know exactly what they’re doing. There’s obviously risk involved, but they’re not worried about this thing so much. They’re worried about getting shot at. That was so interesting to me because I was thinking, you know, when you’re laying over this thing, that it’s going to blast you to bits. But they’re only worried about getting shot and I thought that was so fascinating. It was very telling of the psychology of what they’re actually thinking about.”

“Here you are trying to defuse a bomb and somebody shoots you in the back of the head,” says Mark Boal, who wrote the film based on time he spent embedded as a journalist with EOD squads in Iraq. “It does happen. EOD is one of the most high-value targets for the insurgency—obviously, because they’re cleaning up their bombs. So, for most of the time, they have bull’s-eyes on their heads.”

“It’s such a momentous responsibility,” Boal says. “The decisions need to be made so quickly and the decisions need to be made on the spot. There’s no textbook that says because this bomb is on this street at this time of day, this is how you should disarm it. There’s a million different ways you can do it. Even though there are tactics and everything, there’s something that’s somewhat improvisational about the job and that’s what we tried to show.”

THE HURT LOCKER OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JULY 17