Some veterans groups are complaining about inaccuracies in the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker.
I've been struggling with why I didn't embrace the movie as much as some other people. Fundamentally, I didn't like Jeremy Renner's character, Staff Sgt. William James, the adrenaline junkie. This is exactly the kind of guy you don't want to go to war with, the kind that can get you killed. That in itself is OK for a movie. Obviously you don't have to love the main character.Narrative arc and all that.
I think the film lost me when James donned civilian clothes, fled his Forward Operating Base and made his way through the streets of Baghdad. It rang completely untrue. No one, NO ONE would have done that. To top it off, he then got back on base without an ID. Anyone who has tried to gain access to a FOB knows the impossibility of that.
A wiser viewer of pop culture may point out that the criticisms are myopic in the sense that telling Hollywood what it should do is as pointless as telling the Taliban what it should do. Perhaps the complaints about Hurt Locker are minor compared to the more offensive inaccuracies of bigger-budget war films.
If you haven't seen The Hurt Locker, see it in a movie theater. The sound is tremendous.
By the way, Foreign Policy has an excellent photo essay on the soldiers of the real Hurt Locker
