"If I'm gonna die, I want to die comfortable."
Back from seeing The Hurt Locker, a movie about an elite Army bomb disposal unit stationed in Iraq. I have to say that while I enjoyed it, the movie did not (pardon the pun) blow me away.
Things I Enjoyed
1. Guy Pearce! Ralph Fiennes! Christian Camargo!
2. All the bomb detonation scenes were just so long and intense. Really well done.
3. Very nice cinematography/direction. It was gritty and real, but pretty (in that weird way), too.
4. Mostly top notch acting from the 3 central characters.
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Things I Didn't Enjoy
1. Unfortunately all my favorite random cameos went boom :(
2. Evangeline Lilly, GO AWAY. You too, David Morse. (Ugh, he creeps me out. I hated him in Dancer in the Dark, House, Medium, and now this too, and he's only in it for like a minute, but still :P)
3. I don't know if this is an Army thing or an actors pretending to be soldiers thing, but I'm a little bit appalled at their lack of skill (and I'm just a pleb, so I have no real knowledge of this stuff, but even to me this came off as sketchy). Seriously, why are you not better at scanning your sectors? Can you not see the suspicious people lurking about? That's how you clear a building? etc. SO MUCH FAIL. (Actually, it might be a tiny tiny bit of an Army thing because even when I was reading The Unforgiving Minute, a book I talked about in a previous post, and Cpt. Mullaney talked about his team's inability to shoot targets, I was a little like "WTF? You're in the freaking Army - DON'T THEY TEACH YOU TO SHOOT?"... LOL, my inner Marine Corp Groupie is totally showing right now, but shit, every Marine is a rifleman. I think they need to expand that to all military disciplines.)
4. That whole sequence where James decides that he and his two subordinates should run willy nilly into a town and rout out the bombers. UM, NO. I get that this was to show that James was a little unhinged and an adrenaline junkie, but shit man, STUPIDEST IDEA EVER. This was when the movie started to lose me. It eventually won me back a little later, but it just wasn't the same afterward.
There were definitely lots of moments I enjoyed in the movie. The only detraction was that a lot of great moments strung together do not automatically result in a great, cohesive movie. That being said, even though I didn't leave the theatre with a sense of "OMG, that was awesome!", I still sort of want to see this movie again. Hah, I'm weird.
