War is unpredictable, and perhaps no more so than on the streets of Baghdad during the Iraq war for the team responsible for defusing and disposing of bombs. The soldiers of Bravo company’s bomb squad face an urban landscape where every bag of trash in the road could conceal a bomb and every bystander could be waiting to detonate it. The movie starts with two soldiers, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldrige, a month away from the end of their rotation with a new Staff Sergeant, William James, who apparently takes great delight in personally defusing bombs with inadequate precautions.
But part of the company’s problem is that there are no adequate precautions. When their remote controlled robot fails and the bomb requires hands-on attention, it falls to the Staff Sergeant to put on a bulky suit and helmet designed to protect the wearer from shrapnel. The only time we see it put to the test it fails miserably. James (Jeremy Renner) recognizes during one particularly nasty bomb scare that the suit is only slowing him down and making him more miserably hot.
Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is cool, rational, and has a healthy interest in self-preservation. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is constantly on edge (understandably), showing early signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (except he’s not really post-trauma yet), and also has a healthy interest in self-preservation. The arrival of James, who is insistent on getting up close and personal with bombs (rather than, for example, evacuating the area and exploding the bomb) just weeks before they are about to complete their duty relatively intact, understandably creates some tension. The way the movie, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal (who co-wrote In the Valley of Elah), portrays the interactions between the soldiers in the field and in between sorties has a tremendously realistic feel. To say it is tense is an understatement. The Hurt Locker shows the nearly impossible task given to the U.S. military in Iraq: to fight a war where the enemy is unknown and hiding amongst your allies.