Kathryn Bigelow's big directorial splash. She got Oscared for best picture and best director. Mark Boal wrote the script and also got Oscared. The other three Oscars were for the sound and editing. Notionally because I discovered Guy Pearce was in it.
Between the setting — Baghdad in 2004 — and the heavy Oscaring I wasn't expecting more than an exercise in flag waving. The jittery handheld camerawork of the first half hour or so was also a real turnoff, but as things settled down I did get mildly interested (but not invested) in Jeremy Renner's Oscar-nom'd bomb disposal expert. Against this was Anthony Mackie's inert performance as his support and Brian Geraghty's over-egged junior, and a general lack of context about what Renner is looking to achieve at any given incident. (In the first scene he removes detonators while in later ones he's looking for controllers.) There's a scene where these three Americans show Ralph Fiennes's British contractors how things are done, which was, just maybe, historically plausible. Being a name actor does not ensure longevity here.
At some point the switch is flicked from character development to plot and the decision making becomes stupid. The japes between gigs are humourless, the whole show leaden, even more so than Black Hawk Down. And overall there's nothing much novel here; the concluding movement goes as it must, right down to plenty being incarnated as a supermarket aisle, just like Oliver Stone/Le Ly Harslip's Heaven and Earth. Just too damn serious. I won't be rushing to see Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by A.O. Scott: Bigelow kept it tight, evading the wider (political, box-office bombing) issues of that war. Stephanie Zacharek: "feels unformed and somewhat unfinished." Paul Mazursky had the same supermarket scene in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Loads of street cats, goats and a few donkeys.
