This movie has received a ton of press and awards already so you probably know the plot but if you don’t here’s a simple summary: The Hurt Locker is about a military bomb squad unit in Iraq.  The squad gets a new leader who’s a rogue type.  The film follows the squad’s day to day operations during their deployment.

This is a really good film.  It does so much so right, focusing on one small piece of a larger story and giving us all the gritty details of that small piece.  It’s a war film but if anything it’s an anti-action film.  Sure there are explosions and deaths and all of that but none of it is meant for excitement.  If anything this is a super taut suspense movie.  Kathryn Bigelow makes us endure countless edge of your seat, what will happen next moments.  There’s a lot of time spent lingering on long drawn out shots and takes and there’s not that quick ADD editing too often seen these days.

The screenplay from Mark Boal is wonderful, but I feel in less capable hands it would not have been as great as it is.  Certainly Bigelow deserves a ton of the credit but performances from Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty really help to drive home the reality of this war and these people’s lives.

Also of note is the incredible cinematography.  There are some shots where you’ll think you’ve fallen into an art film.  One of my favorite shots that has stuck with me is actually one not in Iraq, but one in a supermarket.  It’s a crazy wide shot showing Renner’s character lost in a cereal aisle and you grasp so much about the character in that one single shot it’s just perfect.  Oh also Evangeline Lilly from LOST shows up for about 10 seconds.

I’d run out and see this immediately.  It’s available from Amazon:

Also available via Amazon Video On Demandand of course iTunes: