Staff Sergeant Will James fiddles with the bomb like an IT tech on methamphetamine. He works quickly despite his seventy-pound bomb suit and, as he labors on one IED, discovers five more hidden nearby in the sandy dirt of an Iraqi road. Later, on another mission, he and his explosives team fail to find a way to separate a repentant suicide bomber from his timed explosives. James apologizes and leaves the anguished man alone in a town square. When the bombs do blow, they do not make the fiery tangerine typical of Hollywood explosions, but rather dusty, ugly clouds.

As James struggles to make sense of and then disarm Iraq’s many bombs, he regularly breaks protocol. He takes off his protective suit while working on one particularly puzzling IED because, he reasons, if he must die he “wants to die comfortable.” He is a kind of cowboy artist of explosives, and has channeled all his gifts not into making a home rocket or getting a law degree but into defusing the bombs that would kill him. Instead of collecting old Macintosh computers, James keeps parts from bombs that he has disarmed in a box under his bed.

Each of these scenes is tense and startlingly precise. They feel real. The Hurt Locker’s forensic, formalist style aligns it with documentaries or biopics. But it is defined as a fictional action movie by its screenwriter, director, and studio.

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