The Hurt Locker REVIEW!

Viseral and fantastically made. Everything about the film is well made and provides some of the most tense and suspenseful scenes to come out all year. Kathryn Bigelow proves that she is the best female action/genre director around. While I do like what the film aciheved in a scene building and suspense level, the story didn't do it for me. The story and the character development was almost not there. I hated the protagonist and what his goals were, I thought everybody else was underdeveloped, and I thought that the film was trying hard at times to be heavy-handed with all of these sequences in which you see what these soliders do to each other and some of the things they contemplate doing to each other on and off the field. You get the sense of what these characters are like on the field, but not on a more personal level. I was taken by the chaos that the world of disarming bombs was and I wanted to have something there to hold it all together. I understand that it was the director's intention to not go into the solider's lives, but it alienated me in the sense that I wasn't cheering for really anybody in the whole film. The story was just lacking as was the conclusion to the film. This felt very much like a video game at points with some great set-pieces and tense action scenes, but no real narractive or character to hold it all together. I would have to give this a RENTAL.