Apparently this film came out in 2008, but received little to no press. At least to my knowledge. Considering I'm a movie junkie, its strange that I had never heard of it until this year. Especially since its been receiving rave reviews, which I don't really understand (more on that later). At the moment it has a 97% 'fresh' reading on Rotten Tomatoes.
Its a film about the current Iraq war, centering around Baghdad, and following a small unit of 'EOD'. Not sure what that stands for, but basically it means that whenever a bomb, or suspected bomb is found, these guys get called to defuse that shit. The film doesn't get sucked into the whole question concerning Iraq of 'oh, why are we here?'. All that rhetoric gets thrown out the window. As in my opinion, it should be, to leave room to create an authentic war film that shows human emotion and tragedy, rather than focus on the politics of it all.
Nevermind that many of the action sequences seem pretty un-realistic and border on a Rambo approach to defusing weapons, the content and story are enough to help you ignore such inadequacies. Just as an example though, the films main character, played well by Jeremy Renner (the bad-ass American soldier from 28 Weeks Later) is confronted with a trunk completely full of explosives, enough to level a block. He casually removes his bomb suit, and says 'well if I'm gonna die, might as well die comfortable'. Sure he has a point, the suit would not save his ass from vaporizing, but I'd imagine in the real world nothing of the sort would even be considered during combat. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure the U.S. military uses robotic-drones to diffuse such situations. But hey, this is Hollywood, and we demand to be entertained dammit!
The directing is pretty good, aside from constant and the 'sudden zoom-in, zoom-out' technique, where I guess the quick camera movement is supposed to empasize the drama. Its surprising that this film was well directed, considering the Director's (Kathryn Bigelow) less-than-stellar rap-sheet. It includes such 'classics' as the surfer-bank robbery film Point Break and the Russian submarine flop drama, K-19: The Widowmaker.
Addressing what I had said earlier about the films roaring reviews, some comparring it to Apocalypse Now (one of my favorite movies of all time) and some calling it 'one of the defining films of the decade', these assertions are gross exagerrations in my opinion. Without a doubt, its a good action movie based around the Iraq War, with enough drama and human emotion to keep it from being your run of the mill war flick. Comparing it to Francis Ford Coppolas masterpiece however, is a huge stretch.
8/10
(For reference, I'd give Apocalypse Now a 10/10).
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