Director Kathryn Bigleow figures out how to capture a ‘you-are-there, boots-on-the-ground’ feel on location for The Hurt Locker

In an era when movies seem to offer less and less to paying customers, it’s no small thing to encounter a two-for-one deal like The Hurt Locker. A perceptive study of men at war, it is also the summer’s most stunning action movie.

While such a convergence of brains and brawn may be impossible in the case of Michael Bay, it’s not unprecedented for Kathryn Bigelow, a California native whose remarkably varied CV includes stints as assistant to artist Vito Acconci and wife to James Cameron. Her late ’80s to early ’90s run of Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break established her as a master of the esthetics and eroticism of action cinema.

Largely off her game since 1995’s Strange Days flopped, the 57-year-old director makes a powerful return to form here. Closely based on screenwriter and co-producer Mark Boal’s experiences as an embedded reporter, The Hurt Locker is the story of a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit that’s threatened by a new leader who may be admirably fearless in the line of duty but is dangerously reckless in every other context.

Shot in Jordan not far from the Iraqi border (and with many Iraqi refugees as actors), The Hurt Locker delivers not only the jolts of adrenaline that we Bigelow loyalists demand, but it also counts as the most rigorously researched big-screen representation of the conflict to date. In an interview with Bigelow and Boal in Toronto last September, the filmmaker says that her hope was to give viewers a “you-are-there, boots-on-the-ground” experience, something that the production achieves by being as accurate as possible about everything from the choice of ammunition to the contents of the MRE meal packs.

“Because we had firsthand observation thanks to Mark’s embed, we weren’t making decisions for esthetic reasons,” she says. “It was more like: ‘What’s the colour of the Humvee? Which up-armour package do we use?’ It was always a matter of going back to the source. To have that kind of rigour was pretty exciting.”

Placing such an emphasis on specifics also allowed The Hurt Locker to avoid the political grandstanding so common in movies about war. Like last year’s HBO adaptation of Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, it concentrates first and foremost on matters of professionalism and practicality. Larger issues about this and every other war can then emerge organically from the material.

However, Boal says that some viewers have been thrown by The Hurt Locker’s lack of an obvious ideological framework. “I can understand that desire,” he says, “but it’s not a movie that’s designed to fit into one of those frameworks. That’s because war doesn’t necessarily fit. We wanted it not to be about politics but the place. The place is related to politics and interacting with it, but it’s also separate and distinct. Hopefully, the movie makes a statement that’s a little more complicated than a second-long sound bite.”

As for what that statement is, a major clue can be found in the epigraph that opens The Hurt Locker, which is taken from Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Echoing Hedges, Bigelow says that the dirtiest secret about war is that “some men love it.”

Boal’s experiences bear that out. “There’s kind of a distinction between a successful soldier and a successful human being,” he says. “That was a discovery for me in meeting these guys. The ones who were the most calm, cool and competent were not necessarily the ones you wanted to have a beer with later on in a more normal situation.”

Whether Staff Sgt. William James (played by Jeremy Renner) is meant as a critique or an endorsement of the American warrior code — smart money says both — he’s a worthy addition to the gallery of conflicted, macho dick-swingers who populate Bigelow’s best films. Moreover, The Hurt Locker constantly reminds viewers of both the value and the personal cost of his heroism.

“He’s extraordinary at what he does, and his ability, certainly in the context of the film, is unparalleled,” says Bigelow. “And there’s a bravado that accompanies it which I think is disarming, too. To have such incredible focus and concentration, there’s something energizing about that. All else pales and becomes trivial in comparison. And it has to — your survival depends on that.”

But just as The Hurt Locker’s purpose is not to make a straightforward political point, nor is Bigelow out to serve up images of death and destruction as yet more war porn. What she hopes is that viewers will “see the futility of this particular conflict and walk out of the theatre thinking, ‘I had no idea that’s what’s going on’ and ‘I had no idea that’s what it feels like.’”

Her collaborator understands that few other filmmakers could’ve achieved what Bigelow does here. “In somebody else’s hands, I think this could’ve been the most boring movie of all time,” says Boal. “But she can make paint drying look really suspenseful and scary.”