Context is crucial in analyzing a single shot, which seems obvious, and it’s something I’ve been doing non-stop on One Shot of course. By analyzing the context, you can get a clearer view of the shot in question. Shots gain meaning through their context, they gain beauty even.

An Army veteran and former explosive ordnance disposal technician explains why “The Hurt Locker” should be blown in place.
With six Oscars and nine nominations, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 thriller “The Hurt Locker” is one of the most critically acclaimed war movies to come out of the Global War On Terror.

The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other
artistic media. . . . What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as
psychological dispositions – those deep layers of collective mentality
which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness.

The 2010 Academy Awards took place on a Sunday, as per usual. The jokes were just as bad, hosts Steve Martin and Alex Baldwin just as hit-and-miss, but something was different. The tone felt self-congratulatory.

I didn’t particularly want to go see “The Hurt Locker,” because every other Iraq war movie I’ve seen managed to portray American soldiers as psychopaths in a crude, politically overdetermined video game, with the same hand-held camera tricks and heavy-metal score creating a nauseating sense of randomness and meaninglessness.

The Hurt Locker opens with a quotation from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

In this article I compare two recent films that foreground the body at risk in the
new wars of the twenty-first century. Paradise Now (Abu-Assad, 2005) and The
Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008) convey the subject of the body in war from what
would seem to be opposing perspectives, the first representing the experience of a
resistance fighter, a suicide bomber in present-day Palestine, and the latter rendering
the perceptions of a US soldier, the leader of a bomb disposal squad in Iraq.

The mythos of the hero has existed within the stories of humanity for as long as we can
remember. Within the last hundred years film has become one of the dominant
storytelling media of our culture and numerous films, especially war films, about heroes
and their inspirational actions have been made.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) is a contemporary American war film following the
fictional story of a three-man bomb-disarming team in Iraq. Set in Baghdad, 2004, The Hurt Locker
follows Staff Sergeant William James, an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team leader with
arguably one of the world’s most dangerous jobs: disarming home-made, roadside bombs (called
Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.