War movies don't need to be about politics and motivation for conflict.  We need to have heroes and villains, but it's not necessarily important to draw out who's right and wrong and why in order to make a compelling movie.  Maybe this is why so many Iraq and Afghanistan-based moies have failed to connect with the movie-going public.  People have strong, deep feelings about the war on terror, and while I think those need to be explored in movies too, it's understandable why people don't flock to films like this.  The Hurt Locker is pretty remarkable in that it doesn't really deal with any of that baggage--it finds a compelling story in one small unit of soldiers who have maybe the least enviable job an an entirely unenviable situation.

The film tells the story of a US Bomb Squad that gets called whenever someone spots a wire leading into a pile of trash that might be an IED.  Since there's drama inherent in the act of defusing a bomb, the film doesn't need to inject every scene with a political subtext.  There are no double-crossings or plot twists or secret CIA boogeymen who corrupt the situation.  The movie doesn't need a central villain or a dastardly over-arching plot.  Instead, it winds up being a tense character study of men who are put in impossible situations.  While the movie employs a few well worn war movie archetypes (the unsure rookie, the rogue hothead who breaks rules but wins anyway,) it fleshes those characters out fully so that we care about where the movie leaves them in the end.

People will probably avoid this film as yet another in a stream of movies that either exploit our fears about terrorism or try too hard to work on our already-boiling anger about the way the US has handled things in the Middle East.  That's too bad.  If the movie were set in WWII or South America or the jungles of Vietnam, things might be different.  I hope that other filmmakers will learn from The Hurt Locker that you don't need massive set pieces, huge ensemble casts, big stars, or complicated political motivations to make an entertaining and thoughtful war movie.  I'd rather see a lot more movies like this than one more made by Ridley Scott with slow motion helicopters.