The Hurt Locker is fiction. It was marketed as a movie, is criticized as a movie and has the runtime of a movie. Yet outlets call it “hyper-realistic” for its camera work, dialogue and content, and run pieces exposing its “exaggerations“. This is not media spin. Despite screenwriter Mark Boal’s continued claims that “the movie is not a documentary,” the film edges itself in that direction.
The scene with the bounty hunters especially captures The Hurt Locker’s aggressive assertion of reality. A sequence repeats itself. First, we see a mercenary looking, trying to locate his “packages”. Then comes blurry, rippling shot of the target. We briefly see from his perspective. The heat interferes with his vision- with ours’. The result is reminiscent of a desert mirage. This reference to illusion is ironic, in a film that uses technology to capture 58,000 frames a second while it suggests that it is following a human vision.
