Hurt Locker: Did it deserve 6 Oscars?

No. It sucked, and you know it. But people want to support the military, want to shine the light on their sacrifice and that is honorable. They just picked the wrong film to go with. If it was Taking Chance you would be arguing that its a liberal Hollywood style slant against the war.

 

THL is the most inacurate film ever conceived. 1 gun going into 2004 Iraq? LOL a 3 man wrecking ball those guys were.

As long as Avatards are angry, I am happy.

 

That is a very sweeping (and inaccurate) characterization. The movie got mixed reviews from the people that actually do the job, but the bomb experts say that the movie got a lot right, too. On the "wrong" side is the notion that some cowboy mentality on their behalf is tolerated, since it would endanger the entire unit. Another is the reliance on hands-on disabling of bombs. They do as much as they can remotely, to avoid casualties.

Besides, it is a movie. Movies are made to tell stories. If you made a reality movie about some very dangerous occupation, like firefighting, it would be deadly-dull because their lives are not non-stop action. That wouldn't sell too many tickets. If you demand accuracy in your movies, don't cheerlead too hard for Harry Potter, LOTR, Avatar, Titanic, etc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_the_hurt_locker;_ylt=AtM5bH8EjLwc8Mvnq6gn5Nas0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFiYm90ZjMzBHBvcwM1NQRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX3dvcmxkBHNsawNyZWFsaHVydGxvY2s- [Broken]

 

As I said, no. It was boring.

 

It's just another movie fresh from the assembly line, while real pioneering work goes unrewarded.

 

I agree. The goal was to squeeze the lifestyle of an entire year into a 2-hour movie. While it amplifies events beyond what would be real, it at least depicts the reality of how life over there feels.

 

Apparently blood can jam an M81a1, the SAS suck at life, 1 HMMWV driving in the middle of the sandbox with no CAS, driving through Fallujah/Ramadi wherever they were with no support. Having anything less than a squad leave the base is not allowed, let alone three guys in a HMMWV.

The bad outweighs the good tenfold. Of course it is for entertainment, and I enjoyed the explosions and the firefights, but the story was so horribly bad it was hard to watch.

 

I didn't think it was any more "inaccurate" than a thousand other war movies. Everyone praised the realism of Saving Private Ryan, but I think it took longer than 30 minutes to capture Omaha Beach on D-Day.

 

Although I would like to add, that almost every person who has came back from theatre has said that the cereal isle at the end of the movie is the most accurate part of the film.

 

Not really.

I actually enjoyed it, mostly for the depiction of life there, the inclusion of refugees, the attention to scenery details, like the garbage, and the heat. That was all really good, I thought, and interesting.

I don't know which awards were won, but suspect that it probably won mostly for its portrayal of the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian
Although this story was updated, topical, and was very clever in using a situation in that the roles of both were reliant upon and risked by the qualities of the other, it was predictable (I bored the friends I watched it with by roughly predicting most of the rest of the movie as soon as the boy was introduced), and I didn’t think the characterisations were that great.

I can't speak about accuracy, but as far as bomb disposal stories, I’ve heard this was ok, the television series, Danger UXB-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVAZmF2d8es&feature=related

 

What a movie makes on opening day tends to depend on how big the company that produced the film is and how much they market the film before release.

If you go by Hurt Locker's initial release (before a distribution company even agreed to pick up the movie), you're being way overly generous about Hurt Locker's success. It pulled in $145,000 its first weekend, but it was also only released in 4 theaters in New York and Los Angeles. Avatar pulled in $77 million across the entire nation its first weekend.

 

I wouldn't say that they wanted to support the "symbol of war". They used the "symbol of war on terror" to great success to harvest support from academy as a "great movie". It seems that it payed off.

The issue with the movie is that it was plain boring. 2h and 10 mins for a movie which would have been much better at 100min maximum.

Academy Awards are probably as full of politics as anything else. So yeah, they probably lack in many aspects.

Who cares,in the end ? In the streets, Avatar won by KO. This is what counts. Movie critics
can say whatever they want, spell out fantasies about how shallow Avatar is and how "profound" Hurt Locker is, but in the end, a difference of 100x in sales means only one thing. Avatar delivered to ppl.

The problem with critics is they live on another planet. Somewhere far away from Earth. Probably there no one had fallen asleep during Hurt Locker.

 

Btw, if anyone wants to see some good movies about war, my personal recommendations would be "Das boot", "Stalingrad" and "Enemy at the gates". Last is a good illustration of how a game of cat and mouse should be pictured IMO.

 

It's kind of funny how preconceived notions affect how a person perceives the movie.

Watching Inglorious Basterds for the first time was infuriating because the movie departed from real history so drastically. My first impression was "Geez, is this ever stupid!", which evolved to, "This was a pretty cool scene, even if the overall movie had to be one of the stupidest every created." I'm still bugged by taking real historical figures and having them take completely fictitious actions.

With Enemy at the Gates, the problem is how the movie completely butchered a great World War II novel (War of the Rats). The book was so good that I felt offended by the movie. They changed so much that I felt it was an exaggeration to say the movie was even based on the book. The only things in common was that they picked the character names from the novel and they made the characters snipers, just like the book featured snipers.

 

I tend to view entertainment as entertainment, and Im not very concerned by the historical accuracy, realism, and other such factors.

If I want "realism" I watch a documentary, although most of those are also liberal in what information they choose to present, and how.

I didnt read the novel, so I cant comment. I enjoyed the movie. However I can relate to your feelings here. For example Lynch's Dune was for me a movie which completely butchered the book. I didn't liked it at all. With one exception, the music in the movie was inspired IMO.