An intense portrayal of elite soldiers who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: disarming bombs in the heat of combat. When a new sergeant, James, takes over a highly trained bomb disposal team amidst violent conflict, he surprises his two subordinates, Sanborn and Eldridge, by recklessly plunging them into a deadly game of urban combat. James behaves as if he's indifferent to death.... As the men struggle to control their wild new leader, the city explodes into chaos, and James' true character reveals itself in a way that will change each man forever.
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"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
This quote, lifted from renowned Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges' book 'War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning' (2002), is the text that opens Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker - itself scripted by journalist Mark Boal and drawn from his experiences embedded with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in Iraq in 2004. Viewers would do well, amidst the high-tension chaos that follows, to remember Hedges' words, as they represent one of the only verbal articulations of the film's principal theme. Like all the best directors, Bigelow prefers showing to telling, and so she immers...
