The Hurt Locker: The Hurt Locker is one of the best movies of the decade

Photo courtesy of Summit Entertainment

There are moments in the new film "The Hurt Locker" that are so vivid in their attention to the details of the free-for-all that has been the American military experience in Iraq that afterward you will walk out of the theater eyeing stray garbage bags in the alleys off Clark Street for fear they contain unexploded ordinance.

This is the experience served up by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal as they chronicle the movements of Delta Company, an all-purpose bomb squad on the streets of Baghdad in 2004.

Along the way, Bigelow packs the movie with visceral detail that makes it ring sickeningly true: A cat with a broken leg limps across a street; a soldier holds a Capri Sun for another because the man can't take his eyes from the scope of a sniper rifle; a fly lands on his eye and he hesitates to blink it away; a solider cleans the blood that's been jamming his bullets with his own spit; children giggle from a window while watching Delta Company go about its work, one of the older ones shushing the others quiet.

And in between these quiet moments, the story builds around agonizing, gut-wrenching set pieces where the team leader, Staff Sgt. William James, played by Jeremy Renner, races to defuse hulking yet ingeniously disguised improvised explosive devices -- the kind that littered the streets of Iraq, slaughtering soldiers and civilians alike.

My stomach hurt watching this movie. It moves at a frenetic, nearly maddening pace, yet you're never lost the way post-"Bourne" action movies have tended to lose track of their own sequences. The film slows only for those crystal details and heavy, relieving doses of gallows humor.

Of course, it's only half-way through the year, but I would be shocked if "The Hurt Locker" wasn't a top contender for Best Picture at this year's Oscars. The same goes for Bigelow for Best Director and Renner for Best Actor.

Renner has basically starred in nothing, but his Sgt. James is a fantastic creation, cocky and fearless, yet far from the macho cliché of lesser war movies. When one of his men begins to lose it in the midst of battle, he turns on a dime, comforting the man in a way that renegotiates the terms of how you think of his character.

Similarly, James's interactions with Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie, display a very perverse and abnormal bond that forms between people tasked with one of the most dangerous, high-stress jobs on the planet. Mackie is amazing as the tightly-coiled, by-the-book Sanborn, and his contentious relationship with James -- which wavers between homicide and love throughout -- culminates in one of the best scenes of the film: A conversation in which both characters manage to say almost nothing, yet reveal their cores.

So "The Hurt Locker" kicks ass, sure, but one of the best movies of the decade? Really?

Yes, and here's why.

What has this decade, probably recognized in history as the "Bush Era," been about? The answer, of course, is the creeping, insidious nexus of events created by George W. Bush and his misadventure in Iraq. Now, sure you could expand that broad, general claim I just made to include 9/11, Afghanistan, Katrina, rising corporate influence, an exploding budget deficit, surging oil prices, an assault on civil liberties, torture, 24-hour news cycles that tell us almost nothing about what is happening, the polarization of the American electorate, etc., etc.

And in this decade, what has Hollywood delivered to us? To be sure, some good flicks, but very little that says something of the time we live in, the moment in history we occupy.

"The Hurt Locker" is, by design, almost completely a-political. The characters forge bullishly onward with their job -- either because it thrills them or because they just want to get home in one piece -- without ever questioning the purpose of their overall mission. The enemy is faceless as well, reduced to sterile bomb components that Sgt. James keeps under his bed, mostly out of admiration.

But at the same time, by saying nothing it says far more than the crop of Iraq and Afghanistan war movies that have come before it. It says everything you need to know about the way the war was fought -- the reality our troops face in that country versus the blithe, happy way the rest of us live our lives through their deployment. "The Hurt Locker" is about as close as many Americans will come to the nuclear meltdown of emotional turmoil that must come with wondering if the guy on the corner collecting rocks in a wheelbarrow is going to pull out a cell phone, dial a number and detonate an IED that won't leave enough of you intact to send home.

Think of it like this: If this insane, back-asswards decade was a picture of the city of Chicago on GoogleEarth, then most of the films made so far about this particular notch in history are like children's drawings of that image.

"The Hurt Locker" is what you would get if you zoomed in on a ten-foot stretch of sidewalk on State and Wacker and rendered it in unbelievable, breathtaking detail.