Soldiers on a Live Wire Between Peril and Protocol
If “The Hurt Locker” is not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car. The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise……..
Trailer 1
Trailer 2
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Not necessarily about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war, mind you. The filmmakers’ insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well. “The Hurt Locker,” which takes place in 2004 (it was filmed mostly in Jordan), depicts men who risk their lives every day on the streets of Baghdad and in the desert beyond, and who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there………
Opens on Friday, 6.26.09, in New York and Los Angeles.
Official website for THE HURT LOCKER, winner of the 2008 Venice Film Festival SIGNIS Grand Prize.
NPR Fresh Air ‘Hurt Locker’ Creators On Explosive New Thriller
Fresh Air from WHYY, June 24, 2009 ยท Screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow join Fresh Air to discuss their collaboration on The Hurt Locker, a combat movie about an Army bomb squad that roams Iraq in search of explosives to diffuse……..{More at above link}
From the Movie Reality of War to the Reality of War:
Hospital sees more GIs from Afghan frontline
‘We’ve seen a lot … and I hope we can handle it,’ says one staffer
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan – The urgent call came in: Roadside bombs had ripped through two Humvees and wounded eight or nine U.S. soldiers.
Medevac helicopters immediately hit the air to ferry the soldiers to the main U.S. military hospital. But when they arrived, they carried only five patients.
The other four were dead……….