you'll know when you're in it

Make no mistake: Kathryn Bigelow's astounding new film The Hurt Locker is not just a war movie, it's a war movie set in Iraq about bomb technicians.  So you know I mean it when I say it's a little tense.  But I think the thing that most impressed me about it was not only the art direction but the film's subtlety, and how by not over-explaining every single thing that happens onscreen you enter into the minds of the soldiers and begin to grasp how utterly mind-bending it is to work in a foreign combat zone that also happens to be where normal everyday people are trying to live their lives.  Nothing makes sense; all you can do is hope you survive to the end of your rotation, and in the meantime there's drinking and heavy metal and tussling with your buddies and the pure unadulterated adrenaline rush of defusing a bomb that could kill you and fifty others and doing it with your bare hands.  Even though the film is free of political grandstanding beyond the clarity of "war really truly sucks", suddenly the statistics I hear on the news every morning are in sharp focus for me again.  Those are people's lives, not just numbers.  How sad that this film is still completely relevant.