
Will (Jeremy Renner, who owes his career to his tremendous work in this movie) has returned home from Iraq and is grocery shopping with his family. His wife (a thankless role for Evangeline Lilly) tells him to go get some cereal and meet her in the next aisle. We then see Will, blankly staring at this endless sea of cereal boxes, unable to choose one. This man who is a genius in the insane world of bomb defusing is overwhelmed by the mundane task of choosing a box of cereal. His skills are not applicable in this world. His ability to stay calm under immeasurable pressure is negated in regular civilization. He has been made into a specialist by the military and the situations in which he learned to thrive, and it robbed him, seemingly, of his humanity. He doesn’t make sense in this world.

The Hurt Locker opens with the quote “war is a drug.” This sounds insane, impossible, as we are taught to believe the line “war is hell”, and saying that it’s a drug seems counterintuitive. Who would want to keep going back to war the way that junkies go back to drugs? Exactly a guy like Will James, who has no life skills other than the very specialized ones he uses to defuse bombs. He can’t live in regular society, and sadly the movie ends with Will headed off to do another tour of duty in Iraq, not because he wants to fight, but because war is the only place he can feel normal.

The Hurt Locker is one of the greatest of war movies because it allows us into both the exciting action, as well as the hellish interior minds of the soldiers scarred by their service. The moment of Will standing dumbfounded in front of cereal has become the image most associated with the movie in my mind. One of the most powerful shots in cinema because of everything attached to such a seemingly innocuous task by the context in which Kathryn Bigelow expertly puts it in the story. She thoroughly deserved her Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for this movie.
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