Hurt Locker won the Oscar. We all know that. It winning the Oscar was one of the reasons why I wanted to watch it. And watched it I did. With friends saying how good the movie is, I had high expectation. By the time the credit rolled, I thought, why did it win the Oscar?
It is a good movie, that I admit. Scenes of bomb disarmament are involving. I like it. The acting is fantastic.
I do not see why it deserves an Oscar however. There is really nothing special about it and the storyline is not one that is truly memorable.
A bomb specialist dies. A hero bomb specialist replaces the dead bomb specialist. The hero bomb specialist has emotion. Soldiers are human beings too. The hero gets back. The hero gets reposted to some warzone again.
Big deal.
One might want to analyze the theme of the movie and its moral. Do it. However intellectual one wants to get, Hurt Locker remains an action movie that does not require a lot of thinking. The closest it gets in activating my neurons is the scene when the hero is back home in the United States trying to choose a box of cereal out of many brands available.
I watch movies only infrequently. But if this is the best movie for 2009, then 2009 must have had been a really slow year.