Team Mayhem vs. The Hurt Locker

Awhile ago, Danger Room offered a day in the life of an army EOD team called Team Mayhem.

Totally worth the read.

A sample:

At about 7 pm, 28 hours into Team Mayhem's shift, the guys are on the roof of a well-groomed apartment building in one of Iraq's nicest remaining neighborhoods. They're looking at a fist-sized projectile that landed about an hour ago. Palmer identifies it as a Chinese-made 60-millimeter mortar, but there's no way to tell from here if it's about to explode. Palmer looks at Ferraro.

Ferraro squares his gear on his chest and crouches next to the shell, his face inches from the mortar. He takes a whiff. And just then, white smoke starts to curl from the thing. "Water! Get some water right now!" Palmer shouts. He knows that the smoke is from white phosphorus, an incendiary agent that burns on contact with oxygen, and that it will ignite the mortar's highly explosive core. The rooftop? About 15 feet wide.

The only way to stop the shell from detonating is to smother it. Very, very soon. Ferraro runs downstairs to get water from the apartment's owner - "and some sand, too!" Palmer yells to his back. Things get worse; the air crackles with the popcorn sound of automatic weapons fire. Mayhem's security escorts, two sergeants carrying M4 rifles, duck behind the waist-high wall surrounding the roof and point their guns out into the setting sun, looking for targets.

Sounds an awful lot like a movie that just sucked up all the Oscars, right?

Now, I get that the pushback on Hurt Locker has already started - but conveying the intensity of this thing next to me could blow at any second is something that the Hurt Locker does very well.

I've read criticisms about the films accuracy and they seem to focus on EOD boys don't use sniper rifles, or go off base alone, or chase bad guys - which are perfectly valid points - but they miss the fact that the guts of the film hold up rather nicely. EOD is dangerous work, moreso when you don't dominate the lanscape.

Story wise, I had a similar reaction to Saving Private Ryan - as spectacle, there are few comparisons you can make. Both films show you new things, new scenes. They get you by the throat.

But as storytelling...there's not a lot of new ground - and the more you think about the story, the less satisfying it becomes.

(Minor Spoiler alert)





















In the Hurt Locker, you have the classic action hero guy - a risk taking, mavrick, who is at first resented, then admired. If they'd left it at that, the film would be just another clichéd war movie. They do one better, by showing you the main character's personality has drawbacks - things go wrong because of their inability to switch it off. But, at least to me - those elements were switched off just as they were becoming interesting. Here's the other side of this guy - now, roll credits.

Credit to the film for bringing across something more than "hail, the conquering bad-@ss" - but I wonder if the raves on this film were more due to the fact that it was a well-done movie about an ongoing war that didn't take sides.

Anyway - read the Team Mayhem stuff.