It is always nice to see a director like Kathryn Bigelow (director of such commercial garbage as K-19: The Widow Maker, and Point Break) make a little indie film, and completely blow the doors off a movie like Avatar. Her film was made on a small budget, especially compared to the budget of Avatar, and she managed to make a movie that was as thrilling and important to the cinematic experience as any modern war film I have seen in years.
The film centers around a squad of soldiers in Iraq that are assigned to disarming bombs. The film packs a lot of action into the 2 hour running time, but the primary focus of the film is the type of person that it takes to risk their life day after day to disarm bombs. as you might have guessed, there is one soldier in particular that the film focuses on, and similar to Patrick Swayze's role in Point Break, William James is a bit of a cowboy. He bucks the system and really pushes the limits of how much a soldier can be an individual in an organization that stresses teamwork. This starts to wear on his team, and you start to see tensions flare.
What struck me most about this movie is that Bigelow, being a woman, perfectly captures a very masculine tone that is just under the surface of every man on earth. She captures the moments of guys teasing each other, somewhat harshly but all in good fun, that without any forewarning turns into a very tense, but quiet battle of two people that have very different ideas of what teamwork is. Every guy has been there. They are teasing each other and suddenly one person takes it a little too far and what was just boys being rough turns into an all out fight.
The other point that Bigelow makes that I appreciated was that in her film not every citizen in Iraq was a terrorist in waiting. In Peter Berg's 2007 movie "The Kingdom" every person was secretly a terrorist waiting to strike. In Bigelow's film you had the soldiers looking at everyone suspiciously, especially the ones standing around watching as the soldiers disarmed bombs, but she didn't have scenes of random people going home and opening up a trunk to reveal a cache of rocket launchers and C4. The people that were terrorists were labeled as such from the first second of their screen time and everyone else, for the audience at least, was just a citizen that had the bad luck of being born in that country at this time.
All told, this movie is intense. There are gun fights and explosions, and yes several people die, but what the movie is really about is what does it take to be the type of soldier that disarms bombs every day. How does that person deal with waking up every day and preparing themselves to die? And ultimately, once you have lived that life, can you go back to a life where the highlight may be going to Kroger to pick up milk for the family?
Those are some tough questions.
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