When I watched The Hurt Locker, I saw one guy who became addicted to war and a bunch of others that were a mix of scared, confused, and a mess of other emotions.
If anything, I walked away from that film with a sour taste in my mouth about the Iraq War, not a positive feeling. The thing is that I'm not even sure that's what Bigelow was attempting to do with the movie because there was so little political message in the film. It was about a bunch of guys trying to survive. There were no heroics, no grand posturing, just a bunch of guys scared shitless with one borderline lunatic freaking most of them out.
I seriously question exactly what fucking movie some of you were watching. It seems as if you went into the film wanting to take an anti-US stance and started manufacturing "messages" when the movie didn't give you the ammunition you wanted.
Who was the "hero" in the film? The lunatic? If anything, I just felt sorry for that character. War had changed him into someone who couldn't survive in normal society. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement for the war.
The thing is about The Hurt Locker is that you could take those characters and put them in almost any war on almost any side of battle and it works as a film. That's not propaganda, that's a character piece.
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