The Hurt Locker facts for kids
Quick facts for kids The Hurt Locker |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Kathryn Bigelow |
| Produced by |
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| Written by | Mark Boal |
| Starring |
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| Cinematography | Barry Ackroyd |
| Editing by |
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| Studio |
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| Distributed by | Summit Entertainment |
| Release date(s) | September 4, 2008 (65th Venice International Film Festival) June 26, 2009 (United States) |
| Running time | 131 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $15 million |
| Money made | $49.2 million |
The Hurt Locker is a 2008 American war thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat. Boal drew on his experience during embedded access to write the screenplay.
The Hurt Locker premiered at the 2008 Venice International Film Festival before it was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, by Summit Entertainment. The film earned acclaim from critics, who praised Bigelow's directing, Renner's performance, writing, editing, and action sequences. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It was the first Best Picture winner to have been directed by a woman. The film grossed $49.2 million worldwide.
In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Contents
Plot
In 2004, Sergeant First Class William James arrives as the new team leader of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in the Iraq War. He replaces Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson, who was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Baghdad. His team includes Sergeant J. T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge.
James is often approached by an Iraqi youth nicknamed "Beckham", attempting to sell DVDs. James challenges him to a game of football and takes a liking to him.
Sanborn and Eldridge consider James's maverick disposal methods and attitude reckless, raising tensions. When they are assigned to destroy explosives, James returns to the detonation site to pick up his gloves. Sanborn openly contemplates killing him by "accidentally" triggering the explosives, making Eldridge uncomfortable. Nothing is done, and tensions continue to increase.
Returning to Camp Victory in their Humvee, the team encounters five armed men in traditional Arab garb and casual attire standing near a Ford Excursion, which has a flat tire. James's team has a tense encounter with their leader, who reveals they are private military contractors and British mercenaries. They have captured two prisoners featured on the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards. The group comes under fire; when the prisoners attempt to escape in the confusion, the leader of the mercenaries shoots them, as they are valuable dead or alive. Enemy snipers kill three of the mercenaries, including their leader. Sanborn and James borrow a gun to dispatch three attackers, while Eldridge kills a fourth.
During a raid on a warehouse, James discovers a body he believes is Beckham, in which a bomb has been surgically implanted. During the evacuation, Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge, the camp's psychiatrist and a friend of Eldridge, is killed in an explosion; Eldridge blames himself for his death. James breaks into an Iraqi professor's house, seeking revenge for Beckham, but his search reveals nothing.
Called to a petrol tanker detonation, James decides to hunt for the insurgents responsible, guessing they are still nearby. Sanborn protests, but when James begins a pursuit, he and Eldridge reluctantly follow. After they split up, insurgents capture Eldridge. James and Sanborn rescue him, but one of James' rounds hits Eldridge in the leg. The following morning, James is approached by Beckham, alive and well, whom James ignores and walks by silently. Before being airlifted for surgery, Eldridge angrily blames James for his injury.
James and Sanborn's unit is called to another mission in their last two days of their rotation. An innocent Iraqi civilian has had a bomb vest strapped to his chest. James tries to cut off the locks to remove the vest, but there are too many of them. He abandons the man who is then killed when the bomb explodes. Sanborn is distraught by the man's death. He confesses to James he can no longer cope with the pressure and wants to return home and have a son.
After Bravo Company's rotation ends, James returns to his ex-wife Connie and their infant son, who still lives with him in his house. However, he is bored by routine civilian life at home. James confesses to his son there is only one thing he knows he loves. He starts another tour of duty, serving with Delta Company, a U.S. Army EOD unit on its 365-day rotation.
Cast
- Jeremy Renner as Sergeant First Class William James
- Anthony Mackie as Sergeant J. T. Sanborn
- Brian Geraghty as Specialist Owen Eldridge
- Guy Pearce as Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson
- Christian Camargo as Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge
- David Morse as Colonel Reed
- Ralph Fiennes as the leader of a Private Military Company unit
- Evangeline Lilly as Connie James
- Christopher Sayegh as Beckham
- Malcolm Barrett as Sergeant Foster
- Sam Spruell as Contractor Charlie
- Suhail Dabbach as a black-suit suicide bomber
Production
The small-budget film was independently produced and directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The screenplay was written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded as a journalist in 2004 with a U.S. Army EOD team in Iraq.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Italy during 2008. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment. In May 2009, it was the Closing Night selection for Maryland Film Festival. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 2009 but received a more widespread theatrical release on July 24, 2009.
Since the film was not released in the United States until 2009, it was eligible for the Academy Awards only the following year, where it was nominated for nine Oscars. Although the film had not recovered its budget by the time of the ceremony, it won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Bigelow (the first woman to win this award), and Best Original Screenplay for Boal.
Writing
The Hurt Locker is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he accompanied its members 10 to 15 times a day to watch their tasks, and kept in touch with Bigelow via email about his experiences. Boal used his experiences as the basis of a fictional drama based on real events. He said of the film's goal, "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." Bigelow was fascinated with exploring "the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of [their] aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from."
While working with Boal in 2005 on the script, originally titled The Something Jacket, Bigelow began to do some preliminary, rough storyboards to get an idea of the specific location needed. Bomb disarmament protocol requires a containment area. She wanted to make the film as authentic as possible and "put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience."
Casting
For the main characters, Bigelow made a point of casting relatively unknown actors: "it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability." Renner's character, Sergeant First Class William James, is a composite character, with qualities based on individuals whom screenwriter Boal knew when embedded with the bomb squad. To prepare for the film, Renner spent a week living and training at Fort Irwin, a U.S. military reservation in the Mojave Desert in California. He was taught to use C4 explosives, learned how to render safe improvised explosive devices, and how to wear a bomb suit.
Mackie plays Sergeant J. T. Sanborn. Describing the experience of filming in Jordan in the summer, he said, "It was so desperately hot, and we were so easily agitated. But that movie was like doing a play. We really looked out for each other, and it was a great experience. It made me believe in film."
Several hundred thousand refugees of Iraq live in Jordan. Bigelow cast refugees who had theatrical backgrounds, such as Suhail Dabbach. He plays the innocent man used as a suicide bomber at the film's end.
Filming
The film was shot in Jordan, within miles of the Iraqi border, to achieve Bigelow's goal of authenticity. Iraqi refugees were used for extras and the cast worked in the intense heat of the Middle East. The filmmakers had scouted for locations in Morocco, but Bigelow felt its cities did not resemble Baghdad. In addition, she wanted to get as close to the war zone as possible. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraqi border. Bigelow had wanted to film in Iraq, but the production security team could not guarantee their safety from snipers.
Principal photography began in July 2007 in Jordan and Kuwait. Temperatures averaged 120 °F (49 °C) over the 44 days of shooting. Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage. The producer Greg Shapiro spoke about security concerns of filming in Jordan, "It was interesting telling people we were going to make the movie in Jordan because the first question everybody asked was about the security situation here."
Bigelow's choice to film in the Kingdom met some resistance. In discussion, she found that her cast and crew shared stereotypes of the region from American culture. "Sadly people in America and Los Angeles have these perceptions", she said. "But once you get off the plane you realize it's like Manhattan without the trees", she continued. As Iraq dominated discourse in America and around the world, Bigelow believed that filmmakers would continue to explore the conflict, making Jordan the natural place to film.
According to producer Tony Mark, the blood, sweat and heat captured on-camera in the production was mirrored behind the scenes.
"It's a tough, tough movie about a tough, tough subject", Mark said in an interview, "There was a palpable tension throughout on the set. It was just like the onscreen story of three guys who fight with each other, but when the time comes to do the work, they come together to get the job done."
Renner remembered, "I got food bugs. Then I got food poisoning: lost 15 lbs in three days". In addition to the burden of the heat, the bomb suit he had to wear all day weighed 80–100 lb (36–45 kg). In a scene in which his character carries a dead Iraqi boy, Renner fell down some stairs and twisted his ankle, which delayed filming because he could not walk. At that point, "people wanted to quit. All the departments were struggling to get their job done, none of them were communicating". A week later, filming resumed.
Tony Mark recalled the armorer David Fencl's finishing a 12-hour day. He found he had to stay up all night to make proper ammunition for a sniper rifle, as the supplies did not clear Jordanian customs in time for the scheduled shoot. Due to import restrictions on military props, the film's special effects artist Richard Stutsman used Chinese fireworks for gunpowder. One day, he was assembling a prop, and the heat and friction caused the fireworks to blow up in his face. Two days later, he returned to work. The film shoot had few of the normal Hollywood perks; nobody on the set got an air-conditioned trailer or a private bathroom. Renner said that great care was taken to ensure the film's authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. "There were two-by-fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet, and they were throwing rocks.... We got shot at a few times while we were filming", Renner said. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war."
"You can't fake that amount of heat", Mackie says, adding, "When you are on set and all of the extras are Iraqi refugees, it really informs the movie that you're making. When you start hearing the stories from a true perspective ... of people who were actually there, it gives you a clear viewpoint of where you are as an artist and the story you would like to tell. It was a great experience to be there."
Cinematography
For the film, director Bigelow sought to immerse audiences "into something that was raw, immediate and visceral". Impressed with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's work on United 93 and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Bigelow invited him to work on her film. While the film was independently produced and filmed on a low budget, Bigelow used four Super 16 mm cameras to capture multiple perspectives, saying,
"That's how we experience reality, by looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm simultaneously. The eye sees differently than the lens, but with multiple focal lengths and a muscular editorial style, the lens can give you that microcosm/macrocosm perspective and that contributes to the feeling of total immersion."
In staging the film's action sequences, Bigelow did not want to lose a sense of the geography and used multiple cameras to allow her to "look at any particular set-piece from every possible perspective."
Release
Festival screenings
The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4, 2008, and the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. At the festival, the film won the SIGNIS award, the Arca Cinemagiovani Award (Arca Young Cinema Award) for "Best Film Venezia 65" (chosen by an international youth jury); the Human Rights Film Network Award; and the Venezia Cinema Award known as the "Navicella". The film also screened at the 33rd Annual Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, where it generated "keen interest", though distributors were reluctant to buy it since previous films about the Iraq War performed poorly at the box office. Summit Entertainment purchased the film for distribution in the United States in what was perceived as "a skittish climate for pic sales".
In the rest of 2008, The Hurt Locker screened at the 3rd Zurich Film Festival, the 37th Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, the 21st Mar del Plata Film Festival, the 5th Dubai International Film Festival, and the 12th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. In 2009, The Hurt Locker screened at the Göteborg International Film Festival, the 10th Film Comment Selects festival, and the South by Southwest film festival. It was the closing night film at Maryland Film Festival 2009, with Bigelow presenting. It had a centerpiece screening at the 3rd AFI Dallas International Film Festival, where director Kathryn Bigelow received the Dallas Star Award. Other 2009 festivals included the Human Rights Nights International Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Philadelphia Film Festival.
Theatrical run
The Hurt Locker was first publicly released in Italy by Warner Bros. on October 10, 2008. Summit Entertainment picked the film up for distribution in the United States for $1.5 million after it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Hurt Locker was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, with a limited release at four theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. Over its first weekend the film grossed $145,352, averaging $36,338 per theater. The following weekend, beginning July 3, the film grossed $131,202 at nine theaters, averaging $14,578 per theater. It held the highest per-screen average of any film playing theatrically in the United States for the first two weeks of its release, gradually moving into the top 20 chart with much wider-released, bigger budget studio films. It held around number 13 or number 14 on box office charts for an additional four weeks. Summit Entertainment took The Hurt Locker wider to more than 200 screens on July 24, 2009 and more than 500 screens on July 31, 2009.
The film's final gross was $17,017,811 in the United States and Canada, and $32,212,961 in other countries, bringing its worldwide total to $49,230,772. It was a success against its budget of $15 million.
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Hurt Locker performed better than most recent dramas about Middle East conflict. The film outperformed all other Iraq-war-themed films such as In the Valley of Elah (2007), Stop-Loss (2008) and Afghanistan-themed Lions for Lambs (2007).
In the United States, The Hurt Locker is one of only five Best Picture winners (The English Patient, Amadeus, The Artist, and The Shape of Water being the other four) to never enter the weekend box office top 5 since top 10 rankings were first recorded in 1982. It is also one of the only two Best Picture winners on record never to have entered the weekend box office top 10 (The Artist being the other).
The Hurt Locker opened in the top ten in the United Kingdom in 103 theaters, scoring the fourth-highest per-screen average of $3,607, ranking between G-Force and G.I. Joe in overall grosses. The film garnered half a million dollars in its opening weekend in the United Kingdom of August 28 through August 30, 2009, and grossed over a million dollars in the UK, Japan, Spain, and France through March.
Distribution: Independent film print shortage
According to an article in the Springfield, Illinois State Journal-Register, as of August 2009, there was a shortage of film prints of The Hurt Locker, as well as other hit independent films such as Food, Inc. Distributors told theater owners that they would have to wait weeks or months past the initial U.S. release date to get the few available prints that were already in distribution. "Sometimes the distributors goof up," said a film buyer for one theater. "They misjudge how wide they should go." One theory is that the independent films have a hard time competing for screen space during the summer against blockbuster tent-pole films that take up as much as half the screens in any given city, flooding the United States market with thousands of prints. Theater owners have also complained about distributors "bunching too many movies too close together". It is also thought that independent film distributors are trying to cut their losses on prints by recycling them. Given the popularity of some of the films that are "hard to come by", this strategy may be leaving box office money on the table.
Home media
The Hurt Locker was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America on January 12, 2010. This disc includes an added audio commentary featuring director Kathryn Bigelow, writer Mark Boal, and other members of the production crew; an image gallery of photos from shooting; and a 15-minute EPK featurette highlighting the filming experience in Jordan and the film's production. The UK DVD and Blu-ray have no commentary. On February 22,2022, two years after getting a digital 4k release, Lionsgate and Best Buy released a steelbook of the movie, marking the first time it came to 4k. U.S. sales of the DVD topped $30 million by mid-August 2010.
See also
In Spanish: The Hurt Locker para niños
