The Hurt Locker

So I saw "the Hurt Locker" yesterday, and I gotta say, it's pretty awesome.

For those of you who haven't seen the commercials (there haven't been many), The Hurt Locker is a movie about a bomb defusal squad in Iraq. A new team leader gets brought in, and he's so good at his job, he takes a lot of risks he probably shouldn't in order to make things more interesting. This of course leads to plenty of tension between him and the rest of his squad, because he frequently endangers their lives as well as his own.

The story is solid, and the actors are good enough to convey it and make you believe it. The special effects are great, I particularly loved the bounty of explosions that took place. The camera-work was similar to many movies nowadays, frequently switching between far-off camera views to in-your-face suspenseful shakiness.

Despite the war setting, this movie was more suited to the suspense/drama genre, because most of the time is spent getting to know the characters, and even the action sequences are followed by another scene just as long showing how that experience affected them.

Consensus; if you liked movies like Jarhead or The Kingdom, you should definitely see the Hurt Locker, and if you haven't seen those movies, you should watch all of them (excpet maybe Jarhead). If you didn't like those movies, then you could still appreciate the Hurt Locker, as it has its own merits which the others didn't share, and provided you don't mind the main character being a dick.