The Hurt Locker: Video Game-ish War Porn

In some ways The Hurt Locker is a 21st-centuryTriumph of the Will. Like Leni Riefenstahl, Kathryn Bigelow is a brilliant filmmaker with a taste for iconic images and the masculine heroic mode. In her production notes, Bigelow says that “on a metaphorical level” this film about an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq, suggests “both the heroism and the futility of the [Iraq] war.” The heroism is everywhere but despite there always being another bomb to defuse, one doesn’t get a sense of futility since these are, with two exceptions, skillfully rendered harmless. In fact, nothing in the film engages the futility of war.