Director, writer and three stars fielding questions afterwards, it was added rush that just hours earlier, The Hurt Locker had won Gotham Independent Film Awards for Best Picture and Best Ensemble Performance of 2009.

At this MoMA “The Contenders” screening, Kathryn Bigelow spoke of the importance of geography in transforming Mark Boal’s screenplay, of employing Iraqi refugees, and of the placement of four Super 16 (blown to 35 mm) cameras at different distances so that the principals could not play to any one particular lens. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty joked about 125° heat during forty-four days’, three hundred hours’ shooting in Jordan, and agreed about the subordination of their and their characters’ individualities within the team on which all depended.

Do not be fooled by claims that only a post-Bush world can appreciate the 131 minutes, for they are non-political and –partisan in treating of troops’ instinctive impulse to survive if not necessarily to return to a specific home. Nor are they unconventional, for the tale is standard, of the recent arrival whose extreme behavior is regarded as imperiling the established group, until he and his mad methods are understood and accepted. “War is a drug,” reads the epigraph, but “I love the adrenaline rush but hate my job” is also a cliché in the reluctant gunslinger with the noble heart, and has been documented--“better than any drug they got on the street”-- among ex-Nam combatants and correspondents interviewed in Coco Schrijber’s undistributed First Kill.

Bigelow’s overall output is slowed by the independent’s need to drum up cash, but she works relatively quickly, the film’s planned-out pieces subsumed in on-set collaboration. “From the beginning, I wanted [this one] to feel experiential, as though you were walking down that street” in Baghdad. Here, screen “men of thought express that thought in action” more than speech, and thus the audience responds on a visceral level. For this, the film’s strongest impact, much credit goes to cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski.

Title indications of time remaining in Bravo Company’s 2004 tour of duty grow too random to develop suspense, which does arise, however, from the film-eyes being in their skins, as it were, and inside looking out with heavy breathing from armored suits or Humvees.

SPOILER ALERT

Upsetting audience pre-expectations so as to counterbalance with others then built up, Bigelow surprises by disposing of name performers in few frames. Thus Ralph Fiennes midway as a contracted bounty hunter, and Guy Pearce early on, his Sergeant Thompson blown up by a homemade explosive device. The latter’s grieving buddies, efficient if jumpy Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Mackie) and fearful Specialist Owen Eldridge (Geraghty), are brought to full strength by Staff Sergeant Will James (Renner). Brave or reckless, the heavy-smoking newcomer may have disarmed 873 explosive devices, but his disregard for prescribed procedure and safety measures unnerves the other two.

At first apparently a redneck with a tint of racist attitude, he wins a respect not unmixed with terror. The three macho-bond over alcohol and horseplay, but a box of saved “Radio Shack stuff” detonators and a wedding ring reveals a suppressed side of the man, who, like Sanborn, wrestles bugbears of commitment and fatherhood. A rough but affectionate relationship with boy street merchant "Beckham” (Christopher Sayegh) leads to a foolish one-man vendetta mission, and his insistence on their seeking out a vicious bomber is disastrous, even after the three are united in a marvelously realized desert ambush sequence.

To underscore this softer, feminine divided self, and including an evocative supermarket bit with wife Connie (Evangeline Lilly), brief moments of James outside, at home, are the only ones beyond the fog of war in Iraq. The tension of life-and-death situations and of egos that need to cooperate to survive, is manifest in The Hurt Locker, but once that is set up the story goes on too long, repeating itself, losing thematic, although not visual, force. That the heroes return to the U.S. better people is to be hoped for, but by no means certain; that their Delta Company replacements will fare any better in the cycle of blood, is doubtful. 

(Released by Summit Entertainment and rated “R” for war violence and language.)