Excellent from start to finish. A must have purchase on BluRay for the sound and visuals in HD. A story about soldiers doing a job in a war rather than another political statement that seems to always be hidden in movies like this. I'd compare The Hurt Locker to Black Hawk Down and if you liked BHD, you should like The Hurt Locker.

Extraordinary. More than a war film - a profound human drama.

Amazing. Not to be missed.

I'd never heard of it until I rented it. I had zero expectations and was blown away by this movie. This is on par with "Full Metal Jacket." Each war makes a soldier wacky in its own unique way.

Most definitely the best film of 2009. I'm reading a lot of negativity from some viewers here, as for example the ending was sudden. Thats war the there's no epic battle before you leave your duty behind and return home, so it being sudden in many regards went with the films depiction of the Iraq War. Also I did not see any hype behind this movie it just kinda crept in and took a lot of people by surprise with no hype whatsoever. Though on the film. If you like war films that don't follow the over the top climatic battles and heroes like Saving Private Ryan, but prefer more subtle films that show it more so for how war really is, you will enjoy this film… Expand

Masterclass, truly wonderful cinema. The detractorss of this movie don't get it, and I pity them for not being able to appreciate the genius of this production. To those that see and enjoy movies as high art, I envy you the thrill you are about to experience.

This movie was easily the best of the year. I did a tour in Afghanistan, and for all the things that the director got wrong (lack of consequence for a variety of missteps, etc), she got the emotion and the feel right. (SPOILER ALERT) The best moment, to me: The absurdity of being a badass war hero overseas and returning home and dealing with picking out cereal.

I sometimes despair for the times we live in. If this film is a bore then almost every great film made in the '70s - the golden era of cinema, is a bore. In classic '70s style, The Hurt Locker moves along at a sharp clip, never getting sentimental or overly Hollywood, never manipulating the audience's emotions this way and that. There are no big punchlines, no designer cool worked into the dialogues, no over-scripted, movingly scored dramatic flourishes like the ones in Saving Pvt. Ryan and YET when the film gets over you are hit by a wave of emotions. You care more for Renner, Mackie and Geraghty than pretty much any character you watched all year. The script throws up several unexpected moments of wry ironic wit, it gets you caught up in the tightwire mental state of the characters without any fanfare. This is a rare film that confidently expects you to think, feel and discuss it well after the experience. You're haunted by how much the human spirit is being relentlessly stretched in such a lonely, desolate war waged in an unfamiliar, alienated terrain. This desolation is imprinted in our brains thanks to the stark, white sand covered images. The Hurt Locker has a resonance that's lasted 8 months since I saw it. IMO, the finest picture of the year took home the Oscar.… Expand

By far one of the best war movies made. This movie may or may not be an accurate representation of what bomb squads in Iraq are faced with but it is a fantastic film regardless.

best film of the year - bar none.

this was an extremely intense movie, i was on the edge of my seat through the majority. For the naive people like RW who gave this movie a 0 because it's a "fairy tale set in current event setting", congratulations you just gave the exact definition of what a large selection of movies are, this one just happens to deal with a current event you are tied into and you took things personally. Get over it, it's a great movie.… Expand

Bigelow's POV work is incredible, sucking you into this hot, confusing, and terrifying world. Renner nails the gung-ho army ranger, who loves to stand out from his comrades but at the same time treat them like family. What I loved is how the soldiers are in a pointless battle that they cannot win or really change, yet they are committed and hooked to it... I am a film snob, but this is the only movie all year besides Sin Nombre that I really enjoyed.… Expand

Just watch it.

Easily the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan and on par with Platoon. The film is real, restrained, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat for two and half hours. In a season dominated by movies inspired by and meant to sell toys, here at last is some honest-to-God filmmaking.

One of the best war films I've seen in a long time.

A tremendous movie on the war in Iraq. It is a war we can never win as it is about two different cultures. We value life and the enemy doesn't. None of our boys want to be there but they are pawns in a game of life. Once we leave Iraq the two religious warring factions will kill each other. Democracy will never take a foothold in the Middle East. As for our hero he has an obvious deathwish that sooner or later will be fulfilled. The acting, script, and directing is first rate. No holds barred look as to how ugly this war truly is. NO one will ever win.… Expand

The best movie I've seen in years! Jeremy Renner is insanely good in this movie. As are Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. I haven't watched the Oscars since the late 90s, but if Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal and all the actors are nominated, you bet I'll be sitting in front of my TV rooting for them all to win statues in 2010.

This is possibly the best war movie ever. You feel like you should take a shower by the time you get home. Short of doing a tour of duty in Iraq, it can't get any more realistic and harrowing than this. Is it possible to get post-traumatic syndrome from a film?

One of the best films of the year or any year. Masterful.

This movie is a great character study and a must see. one of its most masterful strengths is how no character in the movie ever feel invincible I found myself constantly wondering if this moment was the character's last. the movie's theme was not forced and instead rather subtle (even enough to make some viewers miss some of it) though very powerful. the ending is by far the most well put together i have ever seen in a war film. NOTE: In terms of accuracy and factualness though some scenes may seem fake (sniper scene) my sister who i saw it with is a psychologist who works for the VA, she told me that the characters were dead on in terms of emotions and the way the interact.… Collapse

Absolutely the most compelling movie I've seen in several years. Beautifully directed and acted. Riveting from start to finish.

Amazing performances and a great story. In my opinion, the best movie of the year so far. Jeremy Renner is incredible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It was exciting from the get-go and never lets up. As far as it being realistic? I'm not one to ask as I've never served. For all of the comments by those who have served, it would be beneficial to both list the blatant accuracies that you site, and to refer some movies that do portray the soldier's plight in an accurate way. In the meantime, this movie was spectacular, realistic or unrealistic.… Expand

Not only the best movie about the Iraq War but one of the best war movies EVER! Rarely does a war movie capture the feverish intensity, conflicting morality, and brutal reality of battle and the soldier. Simply awesome!

This was not a documentary about bomb disposal. This was a film about the human reaction to the overwhelming fear and finality of war. It's about the despair that feeds in Eldrige, the denial of the Col., the emptiness of Sanborn, and the certainty of war that drives James. This film must be interpreted through the opening quote. War is a drug. This film is about how human beings respond to that stimulus and how and why it becomes an all-consuming entity to some and a dice game to others. This was an excellent film.… Expand

Simply the best movie in a military setting.... Nothing quite like it.

this movie is beast!!!!!!!!! all the negative reviewers suck. thats right mofos.... you suck!!!!! the best war movie that ive seen, and the greatest movie since shawshank!!!!! hell yea!!!!!

A masterpiece of cinema plain and simple. It's wonderfully crafted, perfectly paced, with incredibly tense sequences that would have made **** proud. It also deals with the effects of war on the human soul without ever being ham handed or melodramatic. Along with Saving Private Ryan and Letters From Iwo Jima it's the finest War film I have seen of the last 20 years.

New man joins bomb disposal team in Iraq, day-to-day job of diffusing bombs & avoiding crossfire, camaraderie, conflict, decisions.
Almost documentary/fly-on-the-wall style film that does a fantastic job of capturing the atmosphere, tension & overall danger of these soldiers lives.
The acting & dialogue are very natural, great cameos, top-notch cinematography & the claustrophobia of the "bomb suit" scenes are thrilling & uncomfortable.
Excellent incidental music too.… Expand

A war movie with real complicated protagonists. Great tension, great action but great psychological intrigue too. War is a drug, and so is the movie

Realistic or not this is a great film. The plot was laid out in an organized fashion, no cliche twists that make the viewer feel smart. The characters were well written and are open to interpretation. The amount of small details and varied sequence of events makes an easily film to watch multiple times.
But, don't expect an ACTION FILM. @ForrestL I could not agree more.

Well deserved Oscars. Jeremy Renner's performance was memorably outstanding. I watched both HL and Avatar the week before the Oscars and I found this to be more engaging and thrilling than the flashing lights and sounds of Avatar. I'm not saying that Avatar wasn't a good movie but how many people actually saw HL before Avatar? 48 million to 2 billion box office gross (rounded down)

Direction is excellent the actors are perfect but the plot is a little weak. The director has done a perfect work also the main actor is absolutely perfect.

This is a great movie, the film captures the real emotion of being and war- People have empathy during this movie, you can feel the bullets. It is one of the best movies of the decade. It's sad if you can't handle violence but you wanted to see it. It was one of my favorites

Certainly one of the most emotional movies I have ever watched. I was completely immersed in the characters and story line. I was left both breathless and aching for more. I was still thinking about it months later. Can any film expect more than that?

The Hurt Locker is no ordinary war film. In fact, setting aside the iconography and setting of the Iraq war, it's scarcely a war film at all. Rather than making an explicit judgement about the Iraq War, the film instead shifts focus to people and relationships, and how a single moment can change your life forever, or suddenly end it. The best, and most thought provoking scene in the film is one of relative calm, when EOD Seargeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) is on leave from active duty, and looks simply lost while wandering down the cereal isle of an American supermarket. Renner is excellent as James, who is essentially an adrenaline junkie, an addict to thrills and near death experiences, and who is obsessed with getting his next fix. Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty also impress as James' squad-mates, a by-the-book straight man to James' impulsive maverick leader and a jittery and inexperienced young specialist respectively. Guy Pierce and Ralph Fiennes are good as always in minor but quite pivotal roles. The characters are layered and interesting, the expertly paced, sweat-inducing bomb disposal scenes smartly replace the standard running-and-gunning battles found in almost all other war films (there's only one straight gunfight, and even that is drawn-out and minimalistic) and Mark Boal's script is believable and dramatically affecting. I'm quite ashamed to admit that this is the only one of Kathryn Bigelow's films I've seen, but she's undeniably talented behind the camera, grounded and naturalistic in her style (other than using a little well-executed slow-motion for the biggest set pieces) and most pleasingly, unlike her ex-husband Mr Moneybags Cameron, she doesn't yet appear to have been consumed by her own hype. The Hurt Locker is a masterful piece of dramatic storytelling, an excellent analysis of the driving forces of humanity, and one of the cleverest examinations of the impact of war to ever grace the silver screen. It's a crime that no woman before Bigelow has won the Best Picture Academy Award, but The Hurt Locker sets a fine example as the first film to break this trend, and it didn't need in excess of $200,000,000 to do it.… Expand

This is a great picture that is able to capture a tense moment on film. There will be a great deal of intensity that will place you on the end of your seat. This is the best war movie of the decade.

This little Kathryn Bigelow box-office failure ended up proving that it was the little engine that could. It defied the odds: it was a Summer release that was under-viewed but somehow managed enough buzz to rightfully overtake the box-office behemoth "Avatar" at the Academy Awards and take Best Picture. It may not be a film for the actors, but it is a film for anybody who likes to be wowed by amazing sights and amazing direction.… Expand

I watched this movie a long time ago, and i jut recently came back to this review because this movie was featured in the "biggest gap between critics and fans article" so i thought I should look into it because this movie was just fantastic, and I'm really disappointed as to why this movie was on that article. First things first, this movie is not a patriotic movie; this movie is there to show the dehumanizing effects warfare can have upon a person, so I don't know why people can call this a "flag-waving" film when it clearly shows a man practically abandoning his own child to re-immerse himself in warfare. Second, a lot of people complain about the "Sniping" scene as being too boring or just plain unrealistic; this is not Call of Duty, okay... When it comes to sniping in real life, it can take hours to kill a specified target, there is no killstreaks and no quickscoping and if staying in the hot sun all day means that the enemy won't snipe at you back, then that's the best option to take to make sure you get out of there alive (the only thing that seems unrealistic is how an IED Unit has great skill when it comes to using an M107, that evades even me, but that's not reason enough for me to call the whole scene unreal). In truth, this is one of the greater military movies that I have ever seen (It defiantly stacks up mo movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, not saying its better, that's up to you, the viewers) and this movie didn't deserve to be in the previously mentioned article just because its not CoD-leveled action or just cause it doesn't have explosions every single microsecond. Definitely a movie worth watching (if you haven't already) if you are into the classical Vietnam-era films, you won't be disappointed.… Expand

The Hurt Locker is an energetic, pulverizing movie that really shows you what its like for the troops on the other side of the country, and, is supremely well acted. Go see the hurt locker while you can

In a few short moments...everything will change, in this instance, for all war films to come.
The Hurt Locker clutched to this notion and never wained it's grasp through every 130+ minutes of this movie.
Within minutes of this dramatic realisation beginning, my heart is beating to the point of me believing "I could just reach over and let Guy Pearce know whats going on", my point to this is that director Kathryn Bigelow (Point break) has created this epic yet simple, unprecedented, sometimes frightening, drama/war film that shows then relatively unknown actors, portraying just more numbers on a document sent on 365 day rotation in Iraq, in particular an EOD squad, just what can happen in a regular day in war.
This film deals with the emotional barriers that soldiers face in the line of duty, the difficulties of 'routine' life but most of all, it deals with everlasting effect of what being a soldier does to not just your physical well-being, but your mind.
After an explosive opening, we see Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), team leader of the specialised EOD unit also consisting of Sergeant Sandborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). The two soldiers see their leader as a reckless redneck due to his lack of safety and disregard for the rules when it comes to a POA on disposing bombs.
Jeremy Renner carries this film to greater heights than one could possibly have hoped for. As the film progresses we watch the team unravel and get an insight into the day to day activities, or lives of these embedded heroes, a dramatisation, yes, but one so close to the heart it could throw a juggernaut suit on you and take the dreaded steps in the searing sun.
I can't say much more because a film like this needs to be seen and not read about, a masterpiece in every aspect, beautiful, frightening, realism taken to new heights and pushing boundaries like no other, easily in contention for one of the best films in the past decade.… Expand

7 out of 10 by users as of December 2011, really? It deserves better than that! Sure, it is no Saving Private Ryan but it has a VERY intelligent plot involving bombs and the war sequences are entertaining. Besides, the reconnaissance scenes are very unfolding and suspenseful which is the most thrilling part of the movie.

I liked it. I thought the movie was original (which is rare these days) and well worth the watch. The acting was good, the movie was suspensful. The one flaw with it is that the climax wasnt satisfying. The entire film built up to this point that just totally let me down, Even to the point where it was a bit predictable. Still, It was a good film and worth the watch.

IMO - Definently more worthy than Avatar to win the oscar for best picture.… Expand

This is a very good movie. I don't know why so many people are whining about the fact that this isn't realistic. It's a film, it's art, it's fiction, if you can't watch a movie without thinking it's ALL true, and it's all realistic, then you shouldn't watch any movie. Of course the protagonist takes risks which can not be the reality, but it's movie - use your imagination, this is made to entertain people, it's not a documentary, just enjoy it, don't think too much. Great acting by all actors - I believed the emotions, very well done - nice cinematography as well!… Expand

An intelligent movie that intrigues and excites. It is dramatic, tense and the odd bit humorous. This is one of the few films that I would actually call a masterpiece

Entirely typical wartime propaganda that actually very forcefully tries to paint the citizens of the country being attacked and exploited as the bad guys. Absolutely vile.

First off, this is a 9.75 out of 10. Near perfect. Acting is really good. Everyone give a really good job. Score is really good. Story is really great and is also intense. It's a great war tale of the US bomb squad. Plus some scenes in the movie can be so intense that'll it'll keep you guessing what'll happen. Overall, this is a amazing movie. One of the greatest war movies ever. Highly, highly recommended.… Expand

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Great movie! Unlike other war movies about recent conflicts such as Jarhead, this movie is actually entertaining, with some of the best tension filled scenes you will see. And the performance by Jeremy Renner in the lead role is fantastic. I understand that many parts of the movie are "unrealistic", as many people have complained about, but 100% of fictional movies are unrealistic. They have spice up aspects of life to make the film entertaining. I don't believe they mean any disrespect to those in uniform. They're merely trying to make the movie entertaining for the audience. But I understand this is a sensitive subject.… Expand

This is a great movie and one of the best war films I ever watched. The only thing that I didn't like was the use of the shaky camera, but it doesn't really distract from actually telling the story. Personally, I just don't like shaky camera but most of the time it was used in this film was from the main characters' perspective (you got a glimpse of what they saw). When I actually did see the shaky camera it didn't really physically make me nauseated but it did annoyed me.… Expand

Oh my God! One of the most perfect movies I've ever known. You could probably split this thing in half, and make two great works of cinema. There is so much suspense and drama packed into each and every beautifully shot scene that it almost calls forth the sweat on your brow. I ventured further onto the edge of my seat than I knew was humanly possible. When these soldiers are attempting to diffuse mysterious explosives, it almost feels like your well-being is in the balance as well. This long, exhilarating piece is just pumping at the edges with pounds upon pounds of heart-racing, pipe-bursting tension. The Hurt Locker is slow, punishing and weighs down upon you with a pressure that you don't want to stop. Masterful cinematography, directing, acting and vision. Everything is flawlessly clear both visually and intellectually. At no point did I find myself asking about the plot or wondering why something happened. It carries the mark of a great movie which is, you come close to forgetting that it is a movie at all. It becomes real. It leaves you utterly and hopelessly captivated. This was a film made with clarity, vigilance and purpose. So damn good I can't stand it. One for the ages.… Expand