The Hurt Locker
Encyclopedia
The Hurt Locker is a 2009 American war film
about a three-man United States Army
Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow
and the screenplay was written by Mark Boal
, a freelance writer who was embedded as a journalist in 2004 with a US bomb squad in Iraq
. It stars Jeremy Renner
, Anthony Mackie
, and Brian Geraghty
.
The Hurt Locker premiered at the Venice Film Festival
in Italy during 2008. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment
. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 2009 but received a more widespread theatrical release on July 24, 2009.
Because the film was not originally released in the United States until 2009, it was eligible to be judged for the 82nd Academy Awards
where it was nominated for nine Academy Awards
. It won six Oscars including Best Director for Bigelow, the first woman to win this award. It also won Best Picture
, beating out the current highest grossing film of all time, Avatar
, and Best Original Screenplay
for Boal. The Hurt Locker also earned numerous awards and honors from critics' organizations, festivals and groups, including six BAFTA Awards
.
, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges
: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." All the words fade except for the last four.
Sergeant First Class
William James, a battle-tested veteran, arrives as a new team leader in Bravo company of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit during the early stages of the post-invasion period in Iraq in 2004, replacing Staff Sergeant
Thompson, who is killed by a radio-controlled 155mm improvised explosive device
(IED) in Baghdad
. The rest of his team consists of Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist
Owen Eldridge, who guard him as he works in his bombsuit
disarming IEDs.
James's maverick methods and attitude lead Sanborn and Eldridge to consider him reckless, and tensions mount. When they are assigned to destroy some of the explosives in a remote desert area, James returns to the detonation site to pick up his gloves. Sanborn openly contemplates killing James by "accidentally" triggering the explosion, making Eldridge very uncomfortable, but he does nothing.
Driving back to the Camp Victory
in their Humvee
, the team encounter a Ford Excursion with a flat tire and five men clad in Arab garb. After a tense initial encounter, the men reveal themselves to be British mercenaries. They have captured two prisoners featured on the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards
. The entire group suddenly comes under fire and takes cover. When the prisoners attempt to escape in the confusion, the leader of the mercenaries (Ralph Fiennes
) suddenly remembers the bounty for them is "dead or alive", so he shoots them. During the encounter three of the mercenaries are killed, including the leader; Sanborn and James manage to dispatch three attackers, while Eldridge kills a fourth.
During a raid on a warehouse, James discovers the body of a young boy which has been surgically implanted with an unexploded bomb. James believes it to be "Beckham", a young Iraqi DVD seller he had previously befriended. During evacuation, Lieutenant Colonel Cambridge, the camp's psychiatrist, is killed in an explosion and Eldridge blames himself for asking the Colonel to accompany them. Later, James leaves the military compound seeking revenge, but his search leads to nothing.
Called to the nighttime scene of a petrol tanker detonation in order to carry out an assessment, James decides on his own to hunt for the insurgents responsible, guessing they are still in the immediate area. Sanborn protests, but when James heads out, he and Eldridge reluctantly follow. After they split up, Eldridge is captured by insurgents; he is rescued by James and Sanborn, but they accidentally shoot him in the leg.
The following morning, James is approached by Beckham. The young boy tries to sell James some more DVDs, but the soldier walks by without saying a word. Before being airlifted for surgery, Eldridge angrily blames James for his injury.
James and Sanborn's unit is called to another mission, where an innocent Iraqi civilian has had a bomb vest strapped to his chest. James attempts to cut off the locks to remove the vest, but there are too many, forcing him to abandon the mission, and the civilian is blown up. Sanborn becomes emotional and confesses to James that he can no longer cope with the pressure, and wants to return home and have a son.
James returns home to his wife and child. However, the boredom of routine civilian life agitates him. One night, James confesses to his infant son that there is only one thing that he knows he loves. At the close of the film, he is seen starting another tour of duty serving with Delta company of an EOD unit as they are just starting their 365 day rotation.
, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004. Director Kathryn Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work before his experiences, having turned one of his Playboy
articles into the short-lived television series The Inside
in 2002. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he went with the members 10 to 15 times a day to watch their tasks, keeping in touch with Bigelow via email about his experiences. Boal combined his experiences into a fictional retelling of real events. He said of the film's goal, "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship
-conspiracy
way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." Bigelow was fascinated with exploring "the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from."
While working on the script, originally titled "The Something Jacket", with Boal in 2005, Bigelow began to do some preliminary, rough storyboards to get an idea of the specific geography she would be working with because bomb disarmament protocol requires a containment area. She wanted to make the film as authentic as possible and "put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience."
with qualities based on individuals whom screenwriter Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad. Bigelow cast Renner based on his work in Dahmer
, a film about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer
. To prepare for the film, Renner spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a U.S. military reservation in the Mojave Desert
in California
. He was taught to use C4 explosives, learned how to render safe improvised explosive devices, and how to wear a bomb suit.
Mackie plays Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and describes his experience filming in Jordan in the summer, "It was so desperately hot, and we were so easily agitated. But that movie was like doing a play. We really looked out for each other, and it was a great experience. It made me believe in film." In Jordan, Bigelow found several hundred thousand refugees of Iraq
. She cast refugees who had theatrical backgrounds, such as Suhail Aldabbach, who plays a forced suicide bomber at the film's end.
within miles of the Iraqi border, because Bigelow wanted to bring greater authenticity to the film. This benefited filming by supplying many Iraqi refugees for extras and the unmistakable heat of the Middle East. The filmmakers had scouted for locations in Morocco
, but director Kathryn Bigelow felt that Morocco did not look like Baghdad and wanted to get as close to the war zone as possible. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraq border. She wanted to shoot in Iraq but their security team could not guarantee their safety from snipers.
Principal photography began in July 2007 in Jordan and Kuwait
, where temperatures averaged 120 degrees, and lasted 44 days. Producer Greg Shapiro spoke about security concerns of filming in Jordan, "It was interesting telling people we were going to make the movie in Jordan because the first question everybody asked was about the security situation here." Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage.
Filming in the Kingdom was a choice hard for some in production to take at first. To initially convince people to come to Jordan, Bigelow admitted that stereotypes of the region permeate American culture. “Sadly people in America and Los Angeles have these perceptions,” she said. “But once you get off the plane you realise it’s like Manhattan without the trees,” she mused. As Iraq dominates discourse in America and across the world, she believes filmmakers will continue to explore the conflict, making Jordan the natural place to film.
According to producer Tony Mark, the blood, sweat and heat captured on-camera in the production was mirrored behind the scenes. "It's a tough, tough movie about a tough, tough subject", Mark said in an interview, "There was a palpable tension throughout on the set. It was just like the onscreen story of three guys who fight with each other, but when the time comes to do the work, they come together to get the job done." Renner remembered, "I got food bugs. Then I got food poisoning: lost 15 lbs in three days". In addition to the burden of the heat, the bomb suit he had to wear all day weighed between 80 and 100 pounds. In a scene in which his character carries an Iraqi boy he befriended, Renner fell down some stairs and twisted his ankle, which delayed filming because he could not walk. At that point, "people wanted to quit. All the departments were struggling to get their job done, none of them were communicating". A week later, filming resumed.
Producer Tony Mark recalled armorer David Fencl's finishing a 12-hour day and staying up all night to create proper ammunition for a sniper rifle when the supplies did not clear Jordanian customs in time for the scheduled shoot. Due to import restrictions on military props, the film's special effects artist Richard Stutsman used Chinese fireworks for gunpowder. One day, he was assembling a prop, and the heat and friction caused the fireworks to blow up in his face. Two days later, he returned to work. The film shoot had few of the normal Hollywood perks; nobody on the set got an air-conditioned trailer or a private bathroom. Renner said that great care was taken to ensure the film's authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. "There were two-by-fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet, and they were throwing rocks.... We got shot at a few times while we were filming", Renner said. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war."
"You can't fake that amount of heat", Mackie says, adding, "When you are on set and all of the extras are Iraqi refugees, it really informs the movie that you're making. When you start hearing the stories from a true perspective ... of people who were actually there, it gives you a clear viewpoint of where you are as an artist and the story you would like to tell. It was a great experience to be there."
's work on United 93
and The Wind That Shakes the Barley
and invited him to do the camera work for The Hurt Locker. While the film was independently produced and filmed on a low budget, Bigelow used four Super 16 mm cameras to capture multiple perspectives, saying, "That's how we experience reality, by looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm simultaneously. The eye sees differently than the lens, but with multiple focal lengths and a muscular editorial style, the lens can give you that microcosm/macrocosm perspective, and that contributes to the feeling of total immersion." In staging the film's action sequences, Bigelow did not want to lose a sense of geography and used multiple cameras to allow her to "look at any particular set piece from every possible perspective."
and Bob Murawski
. The two editors worked with almost 200 hours of footage from the multiple hand-held cameras in use during the shoot. Adding to the challenge, Boal's screenplay had a non-traditional, asymmetrical, episodic structure. There was no traditional "villain", and tension was derived from the characters' internal conflicts and the suspense from the explosives and snipers. "This movie is kind of like a horror film where you're unable to see the killer," says Innis. "You know a bomb could go off at any minute, but you never know just when it's going to happen, so the ideas of (Alfred) Hitchcock—about making your audience anxious—were influential for us when we did the editing." The raw footage was described as a "hodge-podge of disconnected, nausea-inducing motion that was constantly crossing the 180-degree line".
Innis spent the first eight weeks editing the film on location in Jordan, before returning to Los Angeles where she was joined by Murawski. The process took over eight months to complete. The goal was to edit a brutally realistic portrayal of the realities of war, using minimal special effects or technical enhancement. Innis stated that they "really wanted the film to retain that ‘newsreel’ documentary quality... Too many stage-y effects would have been distracting. The editing in this film was all about restraint".
Editing on location led to additional complications in post-production. The production was unwilling to risk sending undeveloped film through high-security airports where the cans could be opened, X-rayed, or damaged. Accordingly, film was hand-carried on a flight by a production assistant from Amman to London. The Super 16mm film was then transferred to DVcam at a lab in London and the video dailies were then transported by plane back to the Middle East to be imported into the editing system. The whole journey would take anywhere from three days to a week and was described by Innis as the "modern-day equivalent of shipping via donkey cart". The low production budget and the lack of a developed film infrastructure in the area hampered the process, according to Innis. "We were working with grainy Super 16mm film, editing in standard definition. We tried doing FTP downloads, but at the time the facilities in Jordan simply couldn’t handle it." Producer Tony Mark later negotiated the use of a local radio station late at night to receive low-grade Quicktime clips over the Internet so the crew wouldn't be shooting blindly.
Innis also stresses the importance of sound to the editing process. "So much of the rhythms of our editing were based on sonic elements - the breathing of the soldiers, the sounds of explosions, or even the emptiness of sound just prior to a bomb going off." The two editors worked with production tracks recorded by production sound mixer Ray Beckett. Innis credits Beckett's high-quality location sound as the reason they did not need to do much in the way of soundscaping in post-production.
gives the film a score of 97% based on a sample of 209 reviews, with a weighted mean
score of 8.4 out of 10.
It was the second highest-rated film in 2009 at Rotten Tomatoes, behind Pixar
's Up
with 98%. Rotten Tomatoes wrote of the critics' consensus, "A well-acted, intensely shot, action filled war epic, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best reviewed of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War."
Metacritic
, which assigns a rating normalized
to 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, reported that the film has received an average score of 94/100 based on 35 reviews.
Roger Ebert
of The Chicago Sun Times rated the film as the best of the year and one of the best of the decade, writing, "The Hurt Locker is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why." He applauded how the suspense was built, calling the film "spellbinding". Ebert considered Renner "a leading contender for Academy Awards", writing, "His performance is not built on complex speeches but on a visceral projection of who this man is and what he feels. He is not a hero in a conventional sense." He eventually ranked it the second-best film of the decade, behind only Synecdoche, New York
. Richard Corliss
of Time magazine also spoke highly of Renner's performance, calling it a highlight of the film. Corliss wrote, "He's ordinary, pudgy-faced, quiet, and at first seems to lack the screen charisma to carry a film. That supposition vanishes in a few minutes, as Renner slowly reveals the strength, confidence and unpredictability of a young Russell Crowe
. The merging of actor and character is one of the big things to love about this movie... It's a creepy marvel to watch James in action. He has the cool aplomb, analytical acumen and attention to detail of a great athlete, or a master psychopath, maybe both." Corliss praised the film's "steely calm" tone, reflective of its main character. Corliss summarized, "The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes."
A. O. Scott
of The New York Times called The Hurt Locker the best American feature film yet made about the war in Iraq: "You may emerge from The Hurt Locker shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking ... The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise." Scott noticed that the film reserved criticism of the war
but wrote of how the director handled the film's limits, "Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces." He also applauded the convergence of the characters in the film, "[It] focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story." Kenneth Turan
of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the performances of Renner, Mackie, and Geraghty would raise their profiles considerably and said their characters reveal their "unlooked-for aspects", such as Renner's character being playful with an Iraqi boy. Turan applauded Boal's "lean and compelling" script and reviewed Bigelow's direction, "Bigelow and her team bring an awesome ferocity to re-creating the unhinged mania of bomb removal in an alien, culturally unfathomable atmosphere."
Guy Westwell of Sight & Sound
wrote that cinematographer Barry Ackroyd provided "sharp handheld coverage" and that Paul N.J. Ottosson's sound design "uses the barely perceptible ringing of tinnitus to amp up the tension". Westwell praised the director's skill: "The careful mapping of the subtle differences between each bomb, the play with point of view ... and the attenuation of key action sequences ... lends the film a distinctive quality that can only be attributed to Bigelow's clever, confident direction." The critic noted its different take on the Iraq War, writing that "it confronts the fact that men often take great pleasure in war". He concluded, "This unapologetic celebration of a testosterone
-fuelled lust for war may gall. Yet there is something original and distinctive about the film's willingness to admit that for some men (and many moviegoers) war carries an intrinsic dramatic charge." Amy Taubin of Film Comment
described The Hurt Locker as "a structuralist war movie" and "a totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end". Taubin praised Ackroyd's "brilliant" cinematography with multiple viewpoints and also said of the film's editing, "Bob Murawski and Chris Innis's editing is similarly quick and nervous; the rapid changes in POV as they cut from one camera's coverage to another's makes you feel as if you, like the characters, are under threat from all sides."
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal
called it "A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances." Toronto Star
critic Peter Howell said, "Just when you think the battle of Iraq war dramas has been fought and lost, along comes one that demands to be seen... If you can sit through The Hurt Locker without your heart nearly pounding through your chest, you must be made of granite." Entertainment Weekly
s film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film the rare "A" rating, calling it, "an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground. This ain't no war videogame."
Derek Elley of Variety
found The Hurt Locker to be "gripping" as a thriller but felt that the film was weakened by, "its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology". Elley wrote that it was unclear to know where the drama lay: "These guys get by on old-fashioned guts and instinct rather than sissy hardware – but it's not a pure men-under-stress drama either." The critic also felt that the script showed, "signs of artificially straining for character depth". Anne Thompson, also writing for Variety, believed The Hurt Locker to be a contender for Best Picture, particularly based on the unique subject matter pursued by a female director and on being an exception to other films about the Iraq War that had performed poorly.
Tara McKelvey
from The American Prospect
wrote that the film is pro-U.S. Army propaganda, although it sets itself up as anti-war when its message in the beginning is "War is a drug". She continues, "you feel empathy for the soldiers when they shoot. And in this way, the full impact of the Iraq war – at least as it was fought in 2004 – becomes clear: American soldiers shot at Iraqi civilians even when, for example, they just happened to be holding a cell phone and standing near an IED
". She concludes, "For all the graphic violence, bloody explosions and, literally, human butchery that is shown in the film, The Hurt Locker is one of the most effective recruiting vehicles for the U.S. Army that I have seen."
John Pilger
, journalist and documentarian, criticized the film in The New Statesman
, writing that it "offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion." He compared the praise given to The Hurt Locker to the accolades given to 1978's The Deer Hunter
.
, Iraq veteran Kate Hoit said that The Hurt Locker is "Hollywood's version of the Iraq war and of the soldiers who fight it, and their version is inaccurate". She described the film as being more accurate than other recently released war films, but expressed concerns that a number of errors - among them wrong uniforms, lack of radio communication or misbehavior of the soldiers - would prevent service members from enjoying the film.
Author Brandon Friedman
, also a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, shared a similar view at VetVoice: "The Hurt Locker is a high-tension, well-made, action movie that will certainly keep most viewers on the edges of their seats. But if you know anything about the Army, or about operations or life in Iraq, you'll be so distracted by the nonsensical sequences and plot twists that it will ruin the movie for you. It certainly did for me." Friedman criticized the accuracy of the film's representation of combat, saying "in real life, EOD techs don't conduct dangerous missions as autonomous three-man teams without communications gear ... Another thing you'll rarely hear in combat is an EOD E-7 suggesting to two or three of his guys that they leave the scene of an explosion in an Iraqi city by saying: 'C'mon, let's split up. We can cover more ground that way.
At the blog Army of Dude, infantryman and Iraq veteran Alex Horton noted that "the way the team goes about their missions is completely absurd." He still generally enjoyed it and called it "the best Iraq movie to date."
Troy Steward, another combat veteran, wrote on the blog Bouhammer that while the film accurately depicted the scale of bomb violence and the relations between Iraqis and troops, "just about everything else wasn’t realistic". Steward went on to say: "I was amazed that a movie so bad could get any kind of accolades from anyone."
A review published March 8, 2010 in the Air Force Times
cited overall negative reviews from bomb experts in Iraq attached to the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, quoting a bomb disposal team leader who called the film’s portrayal of a bomb expert "grossly exaggerated and not appropriate", and describing the lead character as "more of a run and gun cowboy type…exactly the kind of person that we're not looking for". Another bomb disposal team member said that the lead character's "swagger would put a whole team at risk. Our team leaders don't have that kind of invincibility complex, and if they do, they aren't allowed to operate. A team leader's first priority is getting his team home in one piece."
On the embedded side, former correspondent for The Politico
and Military Times
Christian Lowe (who embedded with U.S. military units each year from 2002 to 2005) explained at DefenseTech: "Some of the scenes are so disconnected with reality to be almost parody."
On the other hand, Henry Engelhardt, an adjutant with the National Explosive Ordnance Disposal Association having 20 years' experience in bomb defusal, complimented the film's atmosphere and depiction of the difficulties of the job, saying, "Of course, no film is realistic in all its details, but the important things were done very well." Screenwriter Mark Boal noted that The Hurt Locker was produced independently, without US Army extras.
where it was one of several phrases meaning "in trouble or at a disadvantage; in bad shape". Boal defended himself to the press, saying "the film is a work of fiction inspired by many people's stories"; he said he talked to more than 100 soldiers during his research. Jody Simon, a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer, noted that "soldiers don't have privacy," and that when the military embedded Boal they gave him full permission to use his observations as he saw fit. Summit Entertainment, the producers of the film, said in early March that they hoped for a quick resolution to the suit.
networks. It would be the largest lawsuit of its kind. On May 28, 2010, it filed a complaint against 5,000 unidentified BitTorrent users in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia; Voltage will demand $1,500 from each defendant to release them from the suit. Several people, however, have refused to settle with the studio. The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has since dropped all cases against the alleged Hurt Locker pirates.
On August 29, 2011, the Federal Court of Canada ordered the three Canadian ISPs, Bell Canada, Cogeco and Videotron to disclose the names and addresses of the subscribers whose IP addresses were suspected to have downloaded a copy of the movie. The ISPs were given two weeks to comply with the order.
on September 4, 2008, and the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. At the festival, the film won the SIGNIS
award, the Arca Cinemagiovani Award (Arca Young Cinema Award) for "Best Film Venezia 65" (chosen by an international youth jury); the Human Rights Film Network Award; and the "Navicella" – Venezia Cinema Award. The film also screened at the 33rd Annual
Toronto International Film Festival
on September 8, where it generated "keen interest", though distributors were reluctant to buy it since previous films about the Iraq War performed poorly at the box office. Summit Entertainment
purchased the film for distribution in the United States in what was perceived as "a skittish climate for pic sales".
In the rest of 2008, The Hurt Locker screened at the 3rd Zurich Film Festival
, the 37th Festival du Nouveau Cinéma
, the 21st Mar del Plata Film Festival
, the 5th Dubai International Film Festival
, and the 12th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
. In 2009, The Hurt Locker screened at the Göteborg International Film Festival, the 10th Film Comment
Selects festival, and the South by Southwest Film Festival. It had a centerpiece screening at the 3rd AFI Dallas International Film Festival, where director Kathryn Bigelow received the Dallas Star Award. Other 2009 festivals included the Human Rights Nights International Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival
, and the Philadelphia Film Festival
.
on October 10, 2008. Summit Entertainment
picked the film up for distribution in the United States after it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
for $1.5 million.
The Hurt Locker was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, with a limited release at four theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. Over its first weekend the film grossed $145,352, averaging $36,338 per theater. The following weekend, beginning July 3, the film grossed $131,202 at nine theaters, averaging $14,578 per theater.
It held the highest per-screen average of any film playing theatrically in the United States for the first two weeks of its release, gradually moving into the top 20 chart with much wider-released, bigger budget studio films. It held around number 13 or number 14 on box office charts for an additional four weeks. Summit Entertainment took The Hurt Locker wider to more than 200 screens on July 24, 2009 and more than 500 screens on July 31, 2009. As of March 21, 2010, the film grossed $40,016,144 against its $15 million production budget, and the domestic total of $16,400,000 places it at number 117 of all films released in the U.S. in 2009.
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Hurt Locker performed better than most recent dramas about Middle East conflict. The film outperformed all other Iraq-war-themed films such as In the Valley of Elah
(2007), Stop-Loss
(2008) and Afghanistan
-themed Lions for Lambs
(2007).
In the United States, The Hurt Locker is one of only three Best Picture winners (The English Patient
and Amadeus
being the other two) to never enter the weekend box office top 5 since top 10 rankings were first recorded in 1982. It is the only Best Picture winner on record never to have entered the weekend box office top 10.
The Hurt Locker opened in the top ten in the United Kingdom in 103 theaters, scoring the fourth highest per screen average of $3,607, ranking between G-Force
and G.I. Joe in overall grosses. The film garnered a half a million dollars in its opening weekend in the United Kingdom of August 28 through August 30, 2009, and has grossed over a million dollars in the UK, Japan, Spain, and France through March.
, State Journal-Register, as of August 2009 there was a shortage of film prints of The Hurt Locker, as well as other hit independent films such as Food Inc. Distributors told theater owners that they will have to wait weeks or months past the initial U.S. release date, to get the few available prints that are already in distribution. "Sometimes the distributors goof up", said a film buyer for one theater, "they misjudge how wide they should go". One theory is that the independent films have a hard time competing for screen space during the summer against blockbuster tent-pole films that take up as much as half the screens in any given city, flooding the United States market with thousands of prints. Theater owners have also complained about distributors "bunching too many movies too close together". It is also thought that independent film distributors are trying to cut their losses on prints by recycling them. Given the popularity of some of the films that are "hard to come by", this strategy may be leaving box office money on the table.
in North America on January 12, 2010. This disc includes an added audio commentary
featuring director Kathryn Bigelow, writer Mark Boal, and other members of the production crew, an image gallery of photos from shooting, and a 15-minute EPK
featurette highlighting the filming experience in Jordan and the film's production. The UK DVD and Blu-ray has no commentary.
U.S. sales of the DVD topped $30 million by mid August 2010.
and won in six: Best Picture
, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing
. It lost the award for Best Actor
to Crazy Heart
, Best Original Score
to Up
, and Best Cinematography
to Avatar. This makes The Hurt Locker the lowest-grossing film to win Best Picture and Bigelow the first woman to win an Oscar for best director.
The Hurt Locker was also nominated for three Golden Globe awards. Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the 2009 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film for the film, the first time a female director has ever won. The film won six awards at the BAFTAs held on February 21, 2010, including Best Film and Best Director for Bigelow. The film swept most critics groups awards for best director and best picture including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Las Vegas film critics associations. The Hurt Locker also became only the fourth film to win all three major U.S. critics group prizes (NY, LA and NSFC) joining Goodfellas
, Schindler's List
and L.A. Confidential
.
The Washington DC Area Film Critics award for Best Director was given to Kathryn Bigelow, the first time the honor has gone to a woman. The five awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics
was the most given out by that organization to a single film in the group's entire 30-year history. In February 2010, the film's producer Nicolas Chartier
emailed a group of Academy Award voters in an attempt to sway them to vote for The Hurt Locker instead of "a $500M film" (referring to Avatar) for the Best Picture award. He later issued a public apology, saying that it was "out of line and not in the spirit of the celebration of cinema that this acknowledgment is". The Academy
later banned him from attending the award ceremony
, the first time the Academy has ever banned an individual nominee.
War film
War films are a film genre concerned with warfare, usually about naval, air or land battles, sometimes focusing instead on prisoners of war, covert operations, military training or other related subjects. At times war films focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles...
about a three-man United States Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark , the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break , the science fiction/film noir Strange Days , the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water and the war drama The Hurt Locker...
and the screenplay was written by Mark Boal
Mark Boal
Mark Boal is an American journalist, screenwriter and film producer. He won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture for The Hurt Locker . His screenplay won six other major awards as well.-Early life and education:...
, a freelance writer who was embedded as a journalist in 2004 with a US bomb squad in Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
. It stars Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Lee Renner is a two-time Academy-Award-nominated American actor and musician. Renner appeared in films throughout the 2000s, mostly in supporting roles. He came to prominence in films such as Dahmer , S.W.A.T. , Neo Ned , 28 Weeks Later and The Hurt Locker...
, Anthony Mackie
Anthony Mackie
Anthony Mackie is an American actor. He has been featured in feature films, television series and Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Drowning Crow, McReele, A Soldier's Play, and Talk, by Carl Hancock Rux, for which he won an Obie Award in 2002.In 2002 he featured...
, and Brian Geraghty
Brian Geraghty
Brian Timothy Geraghty is an American film and television actor, best known for his role in the Academy Award winning film The Hurt Locker.-Early life:Geraghty was born in Toms River Township, New Jersey, and is of Irish ancestry...
.
The Hurt Locker premiered at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
in Italy during 2008. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...
, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment LLC is an independent film studio headquartered in Santa Monica, California with international offices in London.-History:...
. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 2009 but received a more widespread theatrical release on July 24, 2009.
Because the film was not originally released in the United States until 2009, it was eligible to be judged for the 82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...
where it was nominated for nine Academy Awards
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
. It won six Oscars including Best Director for Bigelow, the first woman to win this award. It also won Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Picture
The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...
, beating out the current highest grossing film of all time, Avatar
Avatar (film)
Avatar is a 2009 American epic science fiction motion capture film written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver...
, and Best Original Screenplay
Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay)
The Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best script not based upon previously published material. Before 1940, there was an Academy Award for Best Story for writing. For 1940, it and the award in this article were separated into two awards. Beginning with the...
for Boal. The Hurt Locker also earned numerous awards and honors from critics' organizations, festivals and groups, including six BAFTA Awards
63rd British Academy Film Awards
The 63rd British Academy Film Awards, hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, took place on 21 February 2010 and honoured the best films of 2009. The Hurt Locker took home the most awards, receiving 6 BAFTAS...
.
Plot
The Hurt Locker opens with a quotation from War Is a Force That Gives Us MeaningWar Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a 2002 nonfiction book by journalist Chris Hedges. In the book, Hedges draws on classical literature and his experiences as a war correspondent to argue that war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue...
, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies...
: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." All the words fade except for the last four.
Sergeant First Class
Sergeant First Class
Sergeant First Class is the seventh enlisted rank in the U.S. Army, above Staff Sergeant and below Master Sergeant and First Sergeant, and is the first senior non-commissioned officer rank...
William James, a battle-tested veteran, arrives as a new team leader in Bravo company of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit during the early stages of the post-invasion period in Iraq in 2004, replacing Staff Sergeant
Staff Sergeant
Staff sergeant is a rank of non-commissioned officer used in several countries.The origin of the name is that they were part of the staff of a British army regiment and paid at that level rather than as a member of a battalion or company.-Australia:...
Thompson, who is killed by a radio-controlled 155mm improvised explosive device
Improvised explosive device
An improvised explosive device , also known as a roadside bomb, is a homemade bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than in conventional military action...
(IED) in Baghdad
Baghdad
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...
. The rest of his team consists of Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist
Specialist (rank)
Specialist is one of the four junior enlisted ranks in the U.S. Army, just above Private First Class and equivalent in pay grade to Corporal. Unlike Corporals, Specialists are not considered junior non-commissioned officers...
Owen Eldridge, who guard him as he works in his bombsuit
Bombsuit
A bomb suit or a blast suit is a heavy suit of body armor designed to withstand the pressure released from a bomb and any projectiles the bomb may produce. It is usually worn by trained personnel attempting bomb disposal...
disarming IEDs.
James's maverick methods and attitude lead Sanborn and Eldridge to consider him reckless, and tensions mount. When they are assigned to destroy some of the explosives in a remote desert area, James returns to the detonation site to pick up his gloves. Sanborn openly contemplates killing James by "accidentally" triggering the explosion, making Eldridge very uncomfortable, but he does nothing.
Driving back to the Camp Victory
Camp Victory
Camp Victory is the primary component of the Victory Base Complex which occupies the area surrounding the Baghdad International Airport . The Al-Faw Palace, which served as the headquarters for the Multi-National Corps - Iraq , is located on Camp Victory...
in their Humvee
High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle
The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle , better known as the Humvee, is a military 4WD motor vehicle created by AM General. It has largely supplanted the roles formerly served by smaller Jeeps such as the M151 MUTT, the M561 "Gama Goat", their M718A1 and M792 ambulance versions, the CUCV,...
, the team encounter a Ford Excursion with a flat tire and five men clad in Arab garb. After a tense initial encounter, the men reveal themselves to be British mercenaries. They have captured two prisoners featured on the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards
Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards
In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition, the U.S. military developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of President Saddam Hussein's government, mostly high-ranking Baath Party members or members of the Revolutionary Command Council...
. The entire group suddenly comes under fire and takes cover. When the prisoners attempt to escape in the confusion, the leader of the mercenaries (Ralph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes
Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is an English actor and film director. He has appeared in such films as The English Patient, In Bruges, The Constant Gardener, Strange Days, The Duchess and Schindler's List....
) suddenly remembers the bounty for them is "dead or alive", so he shoots them. During the encounter three of the mercenaries are killed, including the leader; Sanborn and James manage to dispatch three attackers, while Eldridge kills a fourth.
During a raid on a warehouse, James discovers the body of a young boy which has been surgically implanted with an unexploded bomb. James believes it to be "Beckham", a young Iraqi DVD seller he had previously befriended. During evacuation, Lieutenant Colonel Cambridge, the camp's psychiatrist, is killed in an explosion and Eldridge blames himself for asking the Colonel to accompany them. Later, James leaves the military compound seeking revenge, but his search leads to nothing.
Called to the nighttime scene of a petrol tanker detonation in order to carry out an assessment, James decides on his own to hunt for the insurgents responsible, guessing they are still in the immediate area. Sanborn protests, but when James heads out, he and Eldridge reluctantly follow. After they split up, Eldridge is captured by insurgents; he is rescued by James and Sanborn, but they accidentally shoot him in the leg.
The following morning, James is approached by Beckham. The young boy tries to sell James some more DVDs, but the soldier walks by without saying a word. Before being airlifted for surgery, Eldridge angrily blames James for his injury.
James and Sanborn's unit is called to another mission, where an innocent Iraqi civilian has had a bomb vest strapped to his chest. James attempts to cut off the locks to remove the vest, but there are too many, forcing him to abandon the mission, and the civilian is blown up. Sanborn becomes emotional and confesses to James that he can no longer cope with the pressure, and wants to return home and have a son.
James returns home to his wife and child. However, the boredom of routine civilian life agitates him. One night, James confesses to his infant son that there is only one thing that he knows he loves. At the close of the film, he is seen starting another tour of duty serving with Delta company of an EOD unit as they are just starting their 365 day rotation.
Cast
- Jeremy RennerJeremy RennerJeremy Lee Renner is a two-time Academy-Award-nominated American actor and musician. Renner appeared in films throughout the 2000s, mostly in supporting roles. He came to prominence in films such as Dahmer , S.W.A.T. , Neo Ned , 28 Weeks Later and The Hurt Locker...
as Sergeant First Class William James - Anthony MackieAnthony MackieAnthony Mackie is an American actor. He has been featured in feature films, television series and Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Drowning Crow, McReele, A Soldier's Play, and Talk, by Carl Hancock Rux, for which he won an Obie Award in 2002.In 2002 he featured...
as Sergeant J. T. Sanborn - Brian GeraghtyBrian GeraghtyBrian Timothy Geraghty is an American film and television actor, best known for his role in the Academy Award winning film The Hurt Locker.-Early life:Geraghty was born in Toms River Township, New Jersey, and is of Irish ancestry...
as Specialist Owen Eldridge - Guy PearceGuy PearceGuy Edward Pearce is an English-born Australian actor and musician, known for his roles as Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan's Memento, Lieutenant Ed Exley in L.A...
as Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson - Christian CamargoChristian CamargoChristian Camargo is an American actor, perhaps best known for his role of Brian Moser in the Showtime drama Dexter.-Early life:...
as Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge - David MorseDavid Morse (actor)David Bowditch Morse is an American stage, television, and film actor. He first came to national attention as Dr. Jack Morrison in the medical drama St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1988...
as Colonel Reed - Ralph FiennesRalph FiennesRalph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is an English actor and film director. He has appeared in such films as The English Patient, In Bruges, The Constant Gardener, Strange Days, The Duchess and Schindler's List....
as the leader of a Private Military CompanyPrivate military companyA private military company or provides military and security services. These combatants are commonly known as mercenaries, though modern-day PMCs refer to their staff as security contractors, private military contractors or private security contractors, and refer to themselves as private military...
unit. - Evangeline LillyEvangeline LillyEvangeline Lilly is a Canadian actress, best known for her role as Kate Austen in the ABC drama, Lost.-Early life:...
as Connie James - Christopher Sayegh as "Beckham"
Writing
The Hurt Locker is based on accounts of Mark BoalMark Boal
Mark Boal is an American journalist, screenwriter and film producer. He won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture for The Hurt Locker . His screenplay won six other major awards as well.-Early life and education:...
, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004. Director Kathryn Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work before his experiences, having turned one of his Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
articles into the short-lived television series The Inside
The Inside
The Inside is an American crime drama television series created by Tim Minear and Howard Gordon and produced by Imagine Television. The Inside follows the work of the FBI's Los Angeles Violent Crimes Unit , a division dedicated to investigating particularly dangerous crimes. The Inside initially...
in 2002. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he went with the members 10 to 15 times a day to watch their tasks, keeping in touch with Bigelow via email about his experiences. Boal combined his experiences into a fictional retelling of real events. He said of the film's goal, "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
-conspiracy
Conspiracy (civil)
A civil conspiracy or collusion is an agreement between two or more parties to deprive a third party of legal rights or deceive a third party to obtain an illegal objective....
way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." Bigelow was fascinated with exploring "the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from."
While working on the script, originally titled "The Something Jacket", with Boal in 2005, Bigelow began to do some preliminary, rough storyboards to get an idea of the specific geography she would be working with because bomb disarmament protocol requires a containment area. She wanted to make the film as authentic as possible and "put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience."
Casting
For the main characters, Bigelow made a point of casting relatively unknown actors because "it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability." Renner's character, Sergeant First Class William James, is a composite characterComposite character
A composite character is a character composed of two or more individuals, appearing in a fictional or non-fictional work. Two fictional characters are often combined into one upon adaptation of a work from one medium to another, as in the film adaptation of a novel...
with qualities based on individuals whom screenwriter Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad. Bigelow cast Renner based on his work in Dahmer
Dahmer (film)
Dahmer is a 2002 American biopic about the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeremy Renner stars in the title role.There are two timelines in the film: The "present" of the film runs in ordinary chronological order covering the period of one-to-two days; the flashbacks go in reverse order, so...
, a film about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was an American serial killer and sex offender. Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1987 and 1991. His murders involved rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism...
. To prepare for the film, Renner spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a U.S. military reservation in the Mojave Desert
Mojave Desert
The Mojave Desert occupies a significant portion of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, in the United States...
in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. He was taught to use C4 explosives, learned how to render safe improvised explosive devices, and how to wear a bomb suit.
Mackie plays Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and describes his experience filming in Jordan in the summer, "It was so desperately hot, and we were so easily agitated. But that movie was like doing a play. We really looked out for each other, and it was a great experience. It made me believe in film." In Jordan, Bigelow found several hundred thousand refugees of Iraq
Refugees of Iraq
Throughout the past 100 years, there have been a growing number of refugees fleeing Iraq and settling throughout the world, peaking recently with the latest Iraq War. Most of Iraqi Jews, some 120,000, fled the country in mass exodus of 1950-1952. Tens of thousands of Kurds turned displaced and fled...
. She cast refugees who had theatrical backgrounds, such as Suhail Aldabbach, who plays a forced suicide bomber at the film's end.
Filming
The film was shot in JordanJordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
within miles of the Iraqi border, because Bigelow wanted to bring greater authenticity to the film. This benefited filming by supplying many Iraqi refugees for extras and the unmistakable heat of the Middle East. The filmmakers had scouted for locations in Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
, but director Kathryn Bigelow felt that Morocco did not look like Baghdad and wanted to get as close to the war zone as possible. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraq border. She wanted to shoot in Iraq but their security team could not guarantee their safety from snipers.
Principal photography began in July 2007 in Jordan and Kuwait
Kuwait
The State of Kuwait is a sovereign Arab state situated in the north-east of the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south at Khafji, and Iraq to the north at Basra. It lies on the north-western shore of the Persian Gulf. The name Kuwait is derived from the...
, where temperatures averaged 120 degrees, and lasted 44 days. Producer Greg Shapiro spoke about security concerns of filming in Jordan, "It was interesting telling people we were going to make the movie in Jordan because the first question everybody asked was about the security situation here." Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage.
Filming in the Kingdom was a choice hard for some in production to take at first. To initially convince people to come to Jordan, Bigelow admitted that stereotypes of the region permeate American culture. “Sadly people in America and Los Angeles have these perceptions,” she said. “But once you get off the plane you realise it’s like Manhattan without the trees,” she mused. As Iraq dominates discourse in America and across the world, she believes filmmakers will continue to explore the conflict, making Jordan the natural place to film.
According to producer Tony Mark, the blood, sweat and heat captured on-camera in the production was mirrored behind the scenes. "It's a tough, tough movie about a tough, tough subject", Mark said in an interview, "There was a palpable tension throughout on the set. It was just like the onscreen story of three guys who fight with each other, but when the time comes to do the work, they come together to get the job done." Renner remembered, "I got food bugs. Then I got food poisoning: lost 15 lbs in three days". In addition to the burden of the heat, the bomb suit he had to wear all day weighed between 80 and 100 pounds. In a scene in which his character carries an Iraqi boy he befriended, Renner fell down some stairs and twisted his ankle, which delayed filming because he could not walk. At that point, "people wanted to quit. All the departments were struggling to get their job done, none of them were communicating". A week later, filming resumed.
Producer Tony Mark recalled armorer David Fencl's finishing a 12-hour day and staying up all night to create proper ammunition for a sniper rifle when the supplies did not clear Jordanian customs in time for the scheduled shoot. Due to import restrictions on military props, the film's special effects artist Richard Stutsman used Chinese fireworks for gunpowder. One day, he was assembling a prop, and the heat and friction caused the fireworks to blow up in his face. Two days later, he returned to work. The film shoot had few of the normal Hollywood perks; nobody on the set got an air-conditioned trailer or a private bathroom. Renner said that great care was taken to ensure the film's authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. "There were two-by-fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet, and they were throwing rocks.... We got shot at a few times while we were filming", Renner said. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war."
"You can't fake that amount of heat", Mackie says, adding, "When you are on set and all of the extras are Iraqi refugees, it really informs the movie that you're making. When you start hearing the stories from a true perspective ... of people who were actually there, it gives you a clear viewpoint of where you are as an artist and the story you would like to tell. It was a great experience to be there."
Cinematography
For the film, Bigelow sought to immerse audiences "into something that was raw, immediate and visceral". The director was impressed with cinematographer Barry AckroydBarry Ackroyd
Barry Ackroyd BSC is an English cinematographer. Ackroyd frequently works with British film director, Ken Loach. The two filmmakers are known for their anti-Hollywood, naturalistic, neo-realistic cinematographic style.-Life and career:...
's work on United 93
United 93 (film)
United 93 is a 2006 fact-based historical drama film written, co-produced, and directed by Paul Greengrass that chronicles events aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked during the September 11 attacks...
and The Wind That Shakes the Barley
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (film)
The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a 2006 Irish war drama film directed by Ken Loach, set during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War...
and invited him to do the camera work for The Hurt Locker. While the film was independently produced and filmed on a low budget, Bigelow used four Super 16 mm cameras to capture multiple perspectives, saying, "That's how we experience reality, by looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm simultaneously. The eye sees differently than the lens, but with multiple focal lengths and a muscular editorial style, the lens can give you that microcosm/macrocosm perspective, and that contributes to the feeling of total immersion." In staging the film's action sequences, Bigelow did not want to lose a sense of geography and used multiple cameras to allow her to "look at any particular set piece from every possible perspective."
Editing
The Hurt Locker was edited by Chris InnisChris Innis
Christina Jean "Chris" Innis is an American film editor and filmmaker. She was awarded the 2010 Academy Award, BAFTA, and A.C.E awards for "Best Film Editing" on the feature film, The Hurt Locker, shared with co-editor, Bob Murawski...
and Bob Murawski
Bob Murawski
Bob Murawski is an American film editor as well as a film distributor of cult horror and independent films under the "Box Office Spectaculars" and "Grindhouse Releasing" labels. He was awarded the 2010 Academy Award, BAFTA, and A.C.E. awards for "Best Film Editing" on the feature film, The Hurt...
. The two editors worked with almost 200 hours of footage from the multiple hand-held cameras in use during the shoot. Adding to the challenge, Boal's screenplay had a non-traditional, asymmetrical, episodic structure. There was no traditional "villain", and tension was derived from the characters' internal conflicts and the suspense from the explosives and snipers. "This movie is kind of like a horror film where you're unable to see the killer," says Innis. "You know a bomb could go off at any minute, but you never know just when it's going to happen, so the ideas of (Alfred) Hitchcock—about making your audience anxious—were influential for us when we did the editing." The raw footage was described as a "hodge-podge of disconnected, nausea-inducing motion that was constantly crossing the 180-degree line".
Innis spent the first eight weeks editing the film on location in Jordan, before returning to Los Angeles where she was joined by Murawski. The process took over eight months to complete. The goal was to edit a brutally realistic portrayal of the realities of war, using minimal special effects or technical enhancement. Innis stated that they "really wanted the film to retain that ‘newsreel’ documentary quality... Too many stage-y effects would have been distracting. The editing in this film was all about restraint".
Editing on location led to additional complications in post-production. The production was unwilling to risk sending undeveloped film through high-security airports where the cans could be opened, X-rayed, or damaged. Accordingly, film was hand-carried on a flight by a production assistant from Amman to London. The Super 16mm film was then transferred to DVcam at a lab in London and the video dailies were then transported by plane back to the Middle East to be imported into the editing system. The whole journey would take anywhere from three days to a week and was described by Innis as the "modern-day equivalent of shipping via donkey cart". The low production budget and the lack of a developed film infrastructure in the area hampered the process, according to Innis. "We were working with grainy Super 16mm film, editing in standard definition. We tried doing FTP downloads, but at the time the facilities in Jordan simply couldn’t handle it." Producer Tony Mark later negotiated the use of a local radio station late at night to receive low-grade Quicktime clips over the Internet so the crew wouldn't be shooting blindly.
Innis also stresses the importance of sound to the editing process. "So much of the rhythms of our editing were based on sonic elements - the breathing of the soldiers, the sounds of explosions, or even the emptiness of sound just prior to a bomb going off." The two editors worked with production tracks recorded by production sound mixer Ray Beckett. Innis credits Beckett's high-quality location sound as the reason they did not need to do much in the way of soundscaping in post-production.
Critical response
The Hurt Locker received near universal critical acclaim. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
gives the film a score of 97% based on a sample of 209 reviews, with a weighted mean
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 8.4 out of 10.
It was the second highest-rated film in 2009 at Rotten Tomatoes, behind Pixar
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide...
's Up
Up (2009 film)
Up is a 2009 American computer-animated comedy-adventure film produced by Pixar, distributed by Walt Disney Pictures and presented in Disney Digital 3-D. The film premiered on May 29, 2009 in North America and opened the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first animated and 3D film...
with 98%. Rotten Tomatoes wrote of the critics' consensus, "A well-acted, intensely shot, action filled war epic, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best reviewed of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War."
Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a rating normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
to 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, reported that the film has received an average score of 94/100 based on 35 reviews.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
of The Chicago Sun Times rated the film as the best of the year and one of the best of the decade, writing, "The Hurt Locker is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why." He applauded how the suspense was built, calling the film "spellbinding". Ebert considered Renner "a leading contender for Academy Awards", writing, "His performance is not built on complex speeches but on a visceral projection of who this man is and what he feels. He is not a hero in a conventional sense." He eventually ranked it the second-best film of the decade, behind only Synecdoche, New York
Synecdoche, New York
Synecdoche, New York is a 2008 American drama film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was Kaufman's directorial debut.The film premiered in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2008...
. Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
of Time magazine also spoke highly of Renner's performance, calling it a highlight of the film. Corliss wrote, "He's ordinary, pudgy-faced, quiet, and at first seems to lack the screen charisma to carry a film. That supposition vanishes in a few minutes, as Renner slowly reveals the strength, confidence and unpredictability of a young Russell Crowe
Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe is a New Zealander Australian actor , film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a...
. The merging of actor and character is one of the big things to love about this movie... It's a creepy marvel to watch James in action. He has the cool aplomb, analytical acumen and attention to detail of a great athlete, or a master psychopath, maybe both." Corliss praised the film's "steely calm" tone, reflective of its main character. Corliss summarized, "The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes."
A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
of The New York Times called The Hurt Locker the best American feature film yet made about the war in Iraq: "You may emerge from The Hurt Locker shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking ... The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise." Scott noticed that the film reserved criticism of the war
Criticism of the Iraq War
The U.S. rationale for the Iraq War has faced heavy criticism from an array of popular and official sources both inside and outside the United States. Putting this controversy aside, both proponents and opponents of the invasion have also criticised the prosecution of the war effort along a number...
but wrote of how the director handled the film's limits, "Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces." He also applauded the convergence of the characters in the film, "[It] focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story." Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the performances of Renner, Mackie, and Geraghty would raise their profiles considerably and said their characters reveal their "unlooked-for aspects", such as Renner's character being playful with an Iraqi boy. Turan applauded Boal's "lean and compelling" script and reviewed Bigelow's direction, "Bigelow and her team bring an awesome ferocity to re-creating the unhinged mania of bomb removal in an alien, culturally unfathomable atmosphere."
Guy Westwell of Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
wrote that cinematographer Barry Ackroyd provided "sharp handheld coverage" and that Paul N.J. Ottosson's sound design "uses the barely perceptible ringing of tinnitus to amp up the tension". Westwell praised the director's skill: "The careful mapping of the subtle differences between each bomb, the play with point of view ... and the attenuation of key action sequences ... lends the film a distinctive quality that can only be attributed to Bigelow's clever, confident direction." The critic noted its different take on the Iraq War, writing that "it confronts the fact that men often take great pleasure in war". He concluded, "This unapologetic celebration of a testosterone
Testosterone
Testosterone is a steroid hormone from the androgen group and is found in mammals, reptiles, birds, and other vertebrates. In mammals, testosterone is primarily secreted in the testes of males and the ovaries of females, although small amounts are also secreted by the adrenal glands...
-fuelled lust for war may gall. Yet there is something original and distinctive about the film's willingness to admit that for some men (and many moviegoers) war carries an intrinsic dramatic charge." Amy Taubin of Film Comment
Film Comment
Film Comment is an arts and culture magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of which it is the official publication. Film Comment features critical reviews and in-depth analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world...
described The Hurt Locker as "a structuralist war movie" and "a totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end". Taubin praised Ackroyd's "brilliant" cinematography with multiple viewpoints and also said of the film's editing, "Bob Murawski and Chris Innis's editing is similarly quick and nervous; the rapid changes in POV as they cut from one camera's coverage to another's makes you feel as if you, like the characters, are under threat from all sides."
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
called it "A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances." Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
critic Peter Howell said, "Just when you think the battle of Iraq war dramas has been fought and lost, along comes one that demands to be seen... If you can sit through The Hurt Locker without your heart nearly pounding through your chest, you must be made of granite." Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
s film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film the rare "A" rating, calling it, "an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground. This ain't no war videogame."
Derek Elley of Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
found The Hurt Locker to be "gripping" as a thriller but felt that the film was weakened by, "its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology". Elley wrote that it was unclear to know where the drama lay: "These guys get by on old-fashioned guts and instinct rather than sissy hardware – but it's not a pure men-under-stress drama either." The critic also felt that the script showed, "signs of artificially straining for character depth". Anne Thompson, also writing for Variety, believed The Hurt Locker to be a contender for Best Picture, particularly based on the unique subject matter pursued by a female director and on being an exception to other films about the Iraq War that had performed poorly.
Tara McKelvey
Tara McKelvey
Tara Shannon McKelvey is an American journalist who is a senior editor at The American Prospect.McKelvey began her journalism career as a clerk at The New York Times, following her 1987 graduation from Georgetown University.McKelvey, a research fellow at New York University School of Law's Center...
from The American Prospect
The American Prospect
The American Prospect is a monthly American political magazine dedicated to American liberalism. Based in Washington, DC, The American Prospect is a journal "of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics" which focuses on United States politics...
wrote that the film is pro-U.S. Army propaganda, although it sets itself up as anti-war when its message in the beginning is "War is a drug". She continues, "you feel empathy for the soldiers when they shoot. And in this way, the full impact of the Iraq war – at least as it was fought in 2004 – becomes clear: American soldiers shot at Iraqi civilians even when, for example, they just happened to be holding a cell phone and standing near an IED
Improvised explosive device
An improvised explosive device , also known as a roadside bomb, is a homemade bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than in conventional military action...
". She concludes, "For all the graphic violence, bloody explosions and, literally, human butchery that is shown in the film, The Hurt Locker is one of the most effective recruiting vehicles for the U.S. Army that I have seen."
John Pilger
John Pilger
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US....
, journalist and documentarian, criticized the film in The New Statesman
The New Statesman
The New Statesman is an award-winning British sitcom of the late 1980s and early 1990s satirising the Conservative government of the time...
, writing that it "offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion." He compared the praise given to The Hurt Locker to the accolades given to 1978's The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter is a 1978 drama film co-written and directed by Michael Cimino about a trio of Russian American steel worker friends and their infantry service in the Vietnam War. The film stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Savage, John Cazale, and George Dzundza...
.
Response among veterans
The film was criticized by some Iraq veterans and embedded reporters for inaccurately portraying wartime conditions. Writing for The Huffington PostThe Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...
, Iraq veteran Kate Hoit said that The Hurt Locker is "Hollywood's version of the Iraq war and of the soldiers who fight it, and their version is inaccurate". She described the film as being more accurate than other recently released war films, but expressed concerns that a number of errors - among them wrong uniforms, lack of radio communication or misbehavior of the soldiers - would prevent service members from enjoying the film.
Author Brandon Friedman
Brandon Friedman
Brandon Friedman is a writer, veteran, and civil servant who has worked on issues concerning America’s military and veterans communities. He is the author of the combat memoir The War I Always Wanted and works for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs...
, also a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, shared a similar view at VetVoice: "The Hurt Locker is a high-tension, well-made, action movie that will certainly keep most viewers on the edges of their seats. But if you know anything about the Army, or about operations or life in Iraq, you'll be so distracted by the nonsensical sequences and plot twists that it will ruin the movie for you. It certainly did for me." Friedman criticized the accuracy of the film's representation of combat, saying "in real life, EOD techs don't conduct dangerous missions as autonomous three-man teams without communications gear ... Another thing you'll rarely hear in combat is an EOD E-7 suggesting to two or three of his guys that they leave the scene of an explosion in an Iraqi city by saying: 'C'mon, let's split up. We can cover more ground that way.
At the blog Army of Dude, infantryman and Iraq veteran Alex Horton noted that "the way the team goes about their missions is completely absurd." He still generally enjoyed it and called it "the best Iraq movie to date."
Troy Steward, another combat veteran, wrote on the blog Bouhammer that while the film accurately depicted the scale of bomb violence and the relations between Iraqis and troops, "just about everything else wasn’t realistic". Steward went on to say: "I was amazed that a movie so bad could get any kind of accolades from anyone."
A review published March 8, 2010 in the Air Force Times
Air Force Times
Air Force Times is a weekly newspaper serving active, reserve and retired United States Air Force and Air National Guard personnel and their families, providing news, information and analysis as well as community and lifestyle features, educational supplements, and resource guides.Air Force Times...
cited overall negative reviews from bomb experts in Iraq attached to the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, quoting a bomb disposal team leader who called the film’s portrayal of a bomb expert "grossly exaggerated and not appropriate", and describing the lead character as "more of a run and gun cowboy type…exactly the kind of person that we're not looking for". Another bomb disposal team member said that the lead character's "swagger would put a whole team at risk. Our team leaders don't have that kind of invincibility complex, and if they do, they aren't allowed to operate. A team leader's first priority is getting his team home in one piece."
On the embedded side, former correspondent for The Politico
The Politico
The Politico is an American political journalism organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that distributes its content via television, the Internet, newspaper, and radio. Its coverage of Washington, D.C., includes the U.S. Congress, lobbying, media and the Presidency...
and Military Times
Military Times
Military Times is a monthly military history magazine, published by Current Publishing and the Chelsea Magazine Company.- Overview :Military Times is edited by Dr Neil Faulkner, with George Clode, and published by Luke Bilton. The magazine covers all aspects of military history, from battles of...
Christian Lowe (who embedded with U.S. military units each year from 2002 to 2005) explained at DefenseTech: "Some of the scenes are so disconnected with reality to be almost parody."
On the other hand, Henry Engelhardt, an adjutant with the National Explosive Ordnance Disposal Association having 20 years' experience in bomb defusal, complimented the film's atmosphere and depiction of the difficulties of the job, saying, "Of course, no film is realistic in all its details, but the important things were done very well." Screenwriter Mark Boal noted that The Hurt Locker was produced independently, without US Army extras.
Sarver lawsuit
In early March 2010, US Army bomb disposal expert Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against The Hurt Locker. Sarver's lawsuit claimed he used the term "hurt locker" and the phrase "war is a drug" around Boal, that his likeness was used to create the character William James, and that the portrayal of William James defames Sarver. Sarver said he felt "just a little bit hurt, a little bit felt left out" and cheated out of "financial participation" in the film. Sarver claimed he originated the title of the film; however, the title is a decades-old colloquialism for being injured, as in "they sent him to the hurt locker". It dates back to the Vietnam WarVietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
where it was one of several phrases meaning "in trouble or at a disadvantage; in bad shape". Boal defended himself to the press, saying "the film is a work of fiction inspired by many people's stories"; he said he talked to more than 100 soldiers during his research. Jody Simon, a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer, noted that "soldiers don't have privacy," and that when the military embedded Boal they gave him full permission to use his observations as he saw fit. Summit Entertainment, the producers of the film, said in early March that they hoped for a quick resolution to the suit.
Copyright infringement lawsuit
On May 12, 2010, Voltage Pictures, the production company behind The Hurt Locker, announced that it will attempt to sue "potentially tens of thousands" of online computer users who downloaded pirated copies of the film using the BitTorrent protocol over P2PPeer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
networks. It would be the largest lawsuit of its kind. On May 28, 2010, it filed a complaint against 5,000 unidentified BitTorrent users in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia; Voltage will demand $1,500 from each defendant to release them from the suit. Several people, however, have refused to settle with the studio. The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has since dropped all cases against the alleged Hurt Locker pirates.
On August 29, 2011, the Federal Court of Canada ordered the three Canadian ISPs, Bell Canada, Cogeco and Videotron to disclose the names and addresses of the subscribers whose IP addresses were suspected to have downloaded a copy of the movie. The ISPs were given two weeks to comply with the order.
Festival screenings
The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice Film FestivalVenice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
on September 4, 2008, and the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. At the festival, the film won the SIGNIS
SIGNIS
SIGNIS is a Roman Catholic lay ecclesial movement for professionals in the communication media, including radio, television, cinema, video, media education, Internet and new technology. It is a non-profit organization with representation from over 140 countries...
award, the Arca Cinemagiovani Award (Arca Young Cinema Award) for "Best Film Venezia 65" (chosen by an international youth jury); the Human Rights Film Network Award; and the "Navicella" – Venezia Cinema Award. The film also screened at the 33rd Annual
2008 Toronto International Film Festival
The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This 33rd annual festival was from September 4 to September 13, 2008...
Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...
on September 8, where it generated "keen interest", though distributors were reluctant to buy it since previous films about the Iraq War performed poorly at the box office. Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment LLC is an independent film studio headquartered in Santa Monica, California with international offices in London.-History:...
purchased the film for distribution in the United States in what was perceived as "a skittish climate for pic sales".
In the rest of 2008, The Hurt Locker screened at the 3rd Zurich Film Festival
2008 Zurich Film Festival
The third annual 2008 Zurich Film Festival runs from September 25 through October 5, 2008. Actor Peter Fonda will act as prexy of the feature film jury. The festival will introduce a new section this year, Panorama D, dedicated to German-language film from Germany, Austria and Switzerland...
, the 37th Festival du Nouveau Cinéma
Festival du Nouveau Cinéma
The Festival du Nouveau Cinéma was known as the Montreal Festival of New Cinema and New Media until 2004. Founded in 1971, by Claude Chamberlan and Dimitri Eipides, it is an annual independent film festival held in Montreal and features independent films from around the world...
, the 21st Mar del Plata Film Festival
Mar del Plata Film Festival
The Mar del Plata International Film Festival is an international film festival that takes place every November in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina...
, the 5th Dubai International Film Festival
Dubai International Film Festival
The Dubai International Film Festival is an international film festival based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Launched in 2004, it aims to foster the growth of filmmaking in the Arab world.-Overview:...
, and the 12th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Tallinn, Estonia...
. In 2009, The Hurt Locker screened at the Göteborg International Film Festival, the 10th Film Comment
Film Comment
Film Comment is an arts and culture magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of which it is the official publication. Film Comment features critical reviews and in-depth analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world...
Selects festival, and the South by Southwest Film Festival. It had a centerpiece screening at the 3rd AFI Dallas International Film Festival, where director Kathryn Bigelow received the Dallas Star Award. Other 2009 festivals included the Human Rights Nights International Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival
Seattle International Film Festival
The Seattle International Film Festival , held annually in Seattle, Washington since 1976, is among the top film festivals in North America. Audiences have grown steadily; the 2006 festival had 160,000 attendees...
, and the Philadelphia Film Festival
Philadelphia Film Festival
The Philadelphia Film Festival is held annually in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Until 2009 it was generally held during the first weeks of April....
.
Theatrical run
The Hurt Locker was first publicly released in Italy by Warner Bros.Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
on October 10, 2008. Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment LLC is an independent film studio headquartered in Santa Monica, California with international offices in London.-History:...
picked the film up for distribution in the United States after it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...
for $1.5 million.
The Hurt Locker was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, with a limited release at four theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. Over its first weekend the film grossed $145,352, averaging $36,338 per theater. The following weekend, beginning July 3, the film grossed $131,202 at nine theaters, averaging $14,578 per theater.
It held the highest per-screen average of any film playing theatrically in the United States for the first two weeks of its release, gradually moving into the top 20 chart with much wider-released, bigger budget studio films. It held around number 13 or number 14 on box office charts for an additional four weeks. Summit Entertainment took The Hurt Locker wider to more than 200 screens on July 24, 2009 and more than 500 screens on July 31, 2009. As of March 21, 2010, the film grossed $40,016,144 against its $15 million production budget, and the domestic total of $16,400,000 places it at number 117 of all films released in the U.S. in 2009.
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Hurt Locker performed better than most recent dramas about Middle East conflict. The film outperformed all other Iraq-war-themed films such as In the Valley of Elah
In the Valley of Elah
In the Valley of Elah is a 2007 film written and directed by Paul Haggis, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, and Susan Sarandon. The film’s title refers to the Biblical valley where the battle between David and Goliath is said to have taken place....
(2007), Stop-Loss
Stop-Loss (film)
Stop-Loss is a 2008 American drama film directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Abbie Cornish and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures and produced by MTV Films.-Plot:...
(2008) and Afghanistan
War in Afghanistan (2001–present)
The War in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, as the armed forces of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Afghan United Front launched Operation Enduring Freedom...
-themed Lions for Lambs
Lions for Lambs
Lions for Lambs is a 2007 American drama film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. senator, a reporter, and a California college professor. It stars Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep...
(2007).
In the United States, The Hurt Locker is one of only three Best Picture winners (The English Patient
The English Patient (film)
The English Patient is a 1996 romantic drama film based on the novel of the same name by Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. The film, written for the screen and directed by Anthony Minghella, won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture...
and Amadeus
Amadeus (film)
Amadeus is a 1984 period drama film directed by Miloš Forman and written by Peter Shaffer. Adapted from Shaffer's stage play Amadeus, the story is based loosely on the lives of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, two composers who lived in Vienna, Austria, during the latter half of the...
being the other two) to never enter the weekend box office top 5 since top 10 rankings were first recorded in 1982. It is the only Best Picture winner on record never to have entered the weekend box office top 10.
The Hurt Locker opened in the top ten in the United Kingdom in 103 theaters, scoring the fourth highest per screen average of $3,607, ranking between G-Force
G-Force (film)
G-Force is a 2009 spy-fi comedy film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer for Walt Disney Pictures in Disney Digital 3-D. Written by Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, the film is the directorial debut of Hoyt Yeatman, whose earlier work includes contributions in the area of visual effects...
and G.I. Joe in overall grosses. The film garnered a half a million dollars in its opening weekend in the United Kingdom of August 28 through August 30, 2009, and has grossed over a million dollars in the UK, Japan, Spain, and France through March.
Distribution: Independent film print shortage
According to an article in the Springfield, IllinoisSpringfield, Illinois
Springfield is the third and current capital of the US state of Illinois and the county seat of Sangamon County with a population of 117,400 , making it the sixth most populated city in the state and the second most populated Illinois city outside of the Chicago Metropolitan Area...
, State Journal-Register, as of August 2009 there was a shortage of film prints of The Hurt Locker, as well as other hit independent films such as Food Inc. Distributors told theater owners that they will have to wait weeks or months past the initial U.S. release date, to get the few available prints that are already in distribution. "Sometimes the distributors goof up", said a film buyer for one theater, "they misjudge how wide they should go". One theory is that the independent films have a hard time competing for screen space during the summer against blockbuster tent-pole films that take up as much as half the screens in any given city, flooding the United States market with thousands of prints. Theater owners have also complained about distributors "bunching too many movies too close together". It is also thought that independent film distributors are trying to cut their losses on prints by recycling them. Given the popularity of some of the films that are "hard to come by", this strategy may be leaving box office money on the table.
Home media
The Hurt Locker was released on DVD and Blu-rayBlu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
in North America on January 12, 2010. This disc includes an added audio commentary
Audio commentary
On disc-based video formats, an audio commentary is an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with video...
featuring director Kathryn Bigelow, writer Mark Boal, and other members of the production crew, an image gallery of photos from shooting, and a 15-minute EPK
Electronic Press Kit
An electronic press kit is a press kit equivalent in electronic form. An EPK usually takes the form of a website or e-mail, though they are also known to exist in CD and DVD form....
featurette highlighting the filming experience in Jordan and the film's production. The UK DVD and Blu-ray has no commentary.
U.S. sales of the DVD topped $30 million by mid August 2010.
Awards and accolades
Starting with its initial screening at the 2008 Venice International Film Festival, The Hurt Locker has earned many awards and honors. It has also earned its place on more Top 10 lists than any other film of 2009. It was nominated in nine categories at the 82nd Academy Awards82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...
and won in six: Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Picture
The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...
, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing
Academy Award for Film Editing
The Academy Award for Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing...
. It lost the award for Best Actor
Academy Award for Best Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...
to Crazy Heart
Crazy Heart
Crazy Heart is a 2009 American musical-drama film, written and directed by Scott Cooper and based on the 1987 novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb. Jeff Bridges plays a down-and-out country music singer-songwriter who tries to turn his life around after beginning a relationship with a young...
, Best Original Score
Academy Award for Best Original Score
The Academy Award for Original Score is presented to the best substantial body of music in the form of dramatic underscoring written specifically for the film by the submitting composer.-Superlatives:...
to Up
Up (2009 film)
Up is a 2009 American computer-animated comedy-adventure film produced by Pixar, distributed by Walt Disney Pictures and presented in Disney Digital 3-D. The film premiered on May 29, 2009 in North America and opened the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first animated and 3D film...
, and Best Cinematography
Academy Award for Best Cinematography
The Academy Award for Best Cinematography is an Academy Award awarded each year to a cinematographer for work in one particular motion picture.-History:...
to Avatar. This makes The Hurt Locker the lowest-grossing film to win Best Picture and Bigelow the first woman to win an Oscar for best director.
The Hurt Locker was also nominated for three Golden Globe awards. Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the 2009 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film for the film, the first time a female director has ever won. The film won six awards at the BAFTAs held on February 21, 2010, including Best Film and Best Director for Bigelow. The film swept most critics groups awards for best director and best picture including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Las Vegas film critics associations. The Hurt Locker also became only the fourth film to win all three major U.S. critics group prizes (NY, LA and NSFC) joining Goodfellas
Goodfellas
Goodfellas is a 1990 American crime film directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a film adaptation of the 1986 non-fiction book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese...
, Schindler's List
Schindler's List
Schindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark...
and L.A. Confidential
L.A. Confidential (film)
L.A. Confidential is a 1997 American film based on James Ellroy's 1990 novel of the same title, the third book in his L.A. Quartet. Both the book and the film tell the story of a group of LAPD officers in the 1950s, and the intersection of police corruption and Hollywood celebrity...
.
The Washington DC Area Film Critics award for Best Director was given to Kathryn Bigelow, the first time the honor has gone to a woman. The five awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics
Boston Society of Film Critics
The Boston Society of Film Critics is an organization of film reviewers from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, based publications.The BSFC was formed in 1981 to make "Boston's unique critical perspective heard on a national and international level by awarding commendations to the best of the...
was the most given out by that organization to a single film in the group's entire 30-year history. In February 2010, the film's producer Nicolas Chartier
Nicolas Chartier
Nicolas Chartier was born in 1974 and is a French film sales agent and film producer. Chartier is partners with American film producer Dean Devlin in the sales and production company, Voltage Pictures. Voltage has produced its first independent feature film, The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn...
emailed a group of Academy Award voters in an attempt to sway them to vote for The Hurt Locker instead of "a $500M film" (referring to Avatar) for the Best Picture award. He later issued a public apology, saying that it was "out of line and not in the spirit of the celebration of cinema that this acknowledgment is". The Academy
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures...
later banned him from attending the award ceremony
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...
, the first time the Academy has ever banned an individual nominee.