This movie is being forecast as the movie with the smallest audience to ever win Best Picture, if it attains that award on Sunday evening at the Academy Awards. It has nine nominations, the same as Avatar, with which it is vying for the award.
I went to the theater tonight to see The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus once again, but it wasn't showing, so I saw The Hurt Locker. Within minutes of the movie beginning, my heart was pounding, and there was scarcely a break in the suspense and horror for the whole movie.
The story, acting, and characters were very believable, yet there was high drama, pathos, and meaning. I caught myself being cynical about the story, which concerns soldiers in Iraq who work in a unit that defuses bombs and IEDs. For instance, when a soldier confessed that he regretted he hadn't married his girl and had a baby with her as she had wanted, I thought, "Uh oh, that guy's never going to make it." When two soldiers developed a hate/love relationship, I thought, "One of them's a goner for sure." But the movie didn't stick to a formula at all.
I found myself dreading the music, wishing I could shut it out. Because the music was so portentious and added immensely to the sense of danger. The cinematography also contributed to the sense of impending danger. The camera would scan the scene, and stop fleetingly on small details. I found myself suspecting everything I saw. Where was the bomb? Was it in that piece of trash? Around that corner? In the minaret? It was coming, I just knew it! I was on the edge of my seat thru the whole movie.
The movie, and the team, went from awful horrible task to task, each one more horrifying than the one before it. And each task presented greater unknowns and unthinkable challenges. Then, suddenly, the deployment was over and the soldier was faced with the daunting task of selecting a cereal box from a seemingly endless row of almost identical cereal boxes. The soldier is putting his son to bed and muses that one day, he will grow up, and maybe there will remain only one thing that he still loves. What is that one thing? It is revealed, and it will surprise you.
No, it was never explained what the hurt locker is, as far as I could tell. I thought it was perhaps akin to the heart locker, a place where you put your heart and your humanity for safekeeping while you had to do unspeakable things. Maybe someone who has read the book can say.