First off I can't believe this movie won best picture and best director, that just shows me how low the Academy's standards have fallen since I stopped watched it years ago. I can honestly say I don't think I've missed much if this movie is considered a pinnacle of excellence. I also have to admit I don't put much stock or faith in the words "From the Academy" anymore anyhow.
I actually sort of liked this movie despite the many flaws that attempted me from liking it whenever they reared their ugly head. Kathryn Bigelow was the biggest flaw of all in this movie. Her directing was one of the things I thought really hurt this movie and kept it from being that much better. Too many shaky camera shots, jump cut, quick cut, and zoom in to tell what the hell was going on most of the time. When a movie is this action/tense centered and centered on a main character who strives for details in his work,, so he can defuse bombs, everything in the movie must support this detail motif. The audience needs to know what is going on, unless the story line is being ironic or satirical in some way and this movie is not in any sense of those words. I hate not knowing what's going on in a scene anyhow - it just drives me nuts - to be a good artist you must communicate with the audience and that communication must be understood. The Hunger Games is a prime example of a director ruining a perfectly good movie by his choice of not directing and instead just throwing the camera shots around any which way he choose. The Hurt Locker isn't always like this, but most of the time it is and the few times Bigelow chooses to direct or actually set up a memorable shot she succeeded beautifully leaving a lasting image in the mind. But her over all lack of actual direction left me wanting to watch Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket to see an actual directed movie- about war - with characters I got to know and cared about.
I really hate story lines that go for realism and then have that realism broke down with the main character or secondary characters doing things that are totally unrealistic or just plain stupid for the sake of the Hollywoodized or sensationalized story line. The Hurt Locker for the most part adheres to this realism, but it's those few times where the story lines goes totally stupid, it took me away from the realism trying to be achieved. It also took the movie about an hour to start the first act. And that hour time was wasted with no character building. Meaning, I had absolutely no knowledge about any of the characters. Just a bunch of action/tense scenes to build upon. It made it really hard to care about any of the characters so far introduced and what tense, argumentative scenes there were between the characters felt forced because I didn't know these characters.
But other than all of this I had a good time watching this movie despite all the things that jarred me out of the story line. Bigelow does set up some really nice action/tense sequences, when she chooses too - the sniper scene is a good example, which also sets up some good character development between the three main characters, the movie needed more scenes like this. It's the moments after the action where the movie needs to expand on the characters and let the audience care about them so that when a tense/action scene arrives the audience needs to be invested in those characters, so they care about them when they enter the life or death situations. There is a really good movie here wanting to be directed.
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