New on DVD: The Hurt Locker

No matter. This suit isn't built for comfort. It's built to keep its breathing, sweating cargo alive.

But even in that, it sometimes fails.

It's 2004, and a suited Army sergeant shuffles dustily down what seems to be a deserted Iraqi street. His tiny team of fellow bomb technicians waits behind him. A possible explosive device, buried in a mound of debris, lies ahead of him. And around him, a hundred eyes--curious and apprehensive--watch.

Click.

Bang.

An explosion gashes the street, a beast running in every direction. It catches the sergeant and carries him down, shrapnel burrowing into the suit. Scarlet sprays the inside of his visor.

The sergeant's team grieves the loss. But this is war, and the squad still must do its dangerous duty. So a new suit-wearing, shrapnel-bearing sergeant comes in to make it complete again. Staff Sgt. William James says he's not there to fill anyone's shoes: He just wants to do his job.

But for James, defusing bombs is more than a job: It's a rush--an addictive game of chicken. A box under his bed is full "of stuff that almost killed me"--a bomb switch, a piece of wire, a metal casing. He ignores the team's mechanical, bomb-sniffing rover and instead walks into unknown peril himself. During one particularly hairy disarmament, he strips off the suit, rendering himself unprotected.

"If I'm going to die, I'm going to die comfortable," he says.

Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, James' by-the-book wingman, would be far more comfortable if James would stop rolling the dice on every mission.

"This is suicide, man," Sanborn tells James, as the latter man moves to defuse a bomb

 strapped to an Iraqi's chest.

"That's why they call it a suicide bomber, right?" James quips back.

The risks James takes, though, are no laughing matter--particularly for Sanborn, who would very much like to survive long enough to see his plane ticket take him home.

At its core, The Hurt Locker asks a deeply provocative, two-pronged question: Why is it that some people thrive in the middle of a war, and why do they grow to love it so?

James is the film's official case study--a practitioner of one of the Iraq War's most thankless yet most dangerous jobs. And he does it by choice.

"It's a pretty interesting group of people," Mark Boal, who wrote and produced The Hurt Locker, tells salon.com. "You're talking about guys who not only volunteered for the military, which says something in itself, but who volunteered for this super high-risk job. It's a group of people who like evil situations. That's the path they have chosen. Sometimes they can pay a high price for their attraction to risk. It's not unique to the bomb squad. I imagine if you looked at vice detectives in New York City, or firefighters or race-car drivers or war correspondents, you might find the same thing."

James, as played by Jeremy Renner, is in turns sympathetic, heroic, immature and frightening. Is our military better because of people like James? Worse? The film intentionally doesn't tell us. And that may actually be its hidden key to successfully probing the issue. It's as Bryant Frazer writes for deep-focus.com, "The Hurt Locker boils down to an affectionate but ambiguous tribute to the career soldier that's free of condescension, cynicism, or jingoism."

Indeed, The Hurt Locker is undeniably well-crafted and deserves the sky-high accolades it's receiving from many reviewers. But for my purposes in this review, I'll end on a cautionary note: Families enter this war zone at their peril. The film offers us a hard, gritty look at modern warfare, and the view is of an improvised bomb, as it were, seconds away from detonation. It is often not pretty or flattering, and no suit made, no matter how heavy, can protect viewers from its shrapnel.