This is probably a symptom of my being raised in the 80s and being a complete geek as much as anything else, but one thing I often find myself thinking when I watch a movie is what it would be like as a video game. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious – for example, Hellboy struck me this way because of the strange milieu and large amounts of action. Shoot ‘Em Up, which is so awful it’s offensive at times, would also have made a pretty decent game, I think. I won’t speak of Hitman or Bloodrayne out of kindness to anybody who might be reading this.
The Hurt Locker, as a video game, would be an open-ended RPG type thing like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Fallout 3. You’d play a demolitions expert who has to solve all kinds of bomb-related puzzles while simultaneously trying to figure out which of the guys watching you do so are innocent bystanders and which are terrorists hanging around the scene of their soon-to-be crime. Every movement by that crowd from a friendly-looking wave to some guy pulling out his cell phone, is potentially an act of aggression towards you, and yet if you just pull out your assault rifle and go postal on the crowd you automatically lose. You’d be basically on your own in this world – even the innocents don’t want to talk to you too much out of fear – so if you can’t capture the bad guys at the scene of the crime, they’re basically gone until they strike again.
I envision this game lasting oh, 30 or 40 hours. So how does the movie version get away with showing all this in 2 hours? Extremely well, I have to say. Although the pace of this film is perhaps a bit slower than people familiar with Michael Bay might be used to, it uses each scene incredibly well. It maintains a level of suspense so high that you’ll find yourself gripping the edges of your theatre seat without realizing you’re doing so until the film’s over and you’re hands are cramping up. I have to think about to Hitchcock or Kubrick to think of the last time I experienced this level of suspense.
Outside of the suspense, the writing is very solid. Although the film plays with classic war-movie tropes such as the self-nihilistic officer who’s liable to get everybody else killed, the worried grunt who just wants to go home to his family, and the sidekick who should never, ever wear a red shirt in any situation if you know what I mean, it also circumvents them (to great effect re: the main character, but I won’t give anything more away here). In a movie like this where the bombs themselves provide so much automatic plot, it would be easy to let the characters just react to everything and never have a sense of agency of their own, but the movie manages to avoid this as well in a couple sequences (including a great one where the worried grunt and the sidekick have a semi-serious conversation about whether or not it would be worth the paperwork to blow up their boss).
All in all, a fantastic movie. If Persepolis was the best movie of 2008, and it might have been, I don’t think it’s a stretch to call The Hurt Locker the best of ’09.
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John Craven is Bugs Bunny, Millionaire. He owns a mansion and a yacht. 
Man, you know, I’ve never seen it. Got to remedy that. I used to want all movies to be like a video game… Leisure Suit Larry.
I saw this finally last night. I really like it and its open story telling – character-not-plot driven. I may have liked it better than D9, still did not like it better than MOON.