The Hurt Locker¹ is a 2008 American war film about a three-man Explosive Ordnance² Disposal (bomb disposal) team during the Iraq War. The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and the screenplay was written by Mark Boal.

 

The Hurt Locker is a riveting³, suspenseful⁴ portrait of the courage under fire of the military's unrecognized heroes: the technicians of a bomb squad⁵ who volunteer to challenge the odds⁶ and save lives doing one of the world's most dangerous jobs. Three members of the Army's elite⁷ Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad battle insurgents⁸ and one another as they search for and disarm⁹ a wave of roadside bombs on the streets of Baghdad-in order to try and make the city a safer place for Iraqis and Americans alike. Their mission is clear-protect and save-but it's anything but easy, as the margin¹⁰ of error when defusing a war-zone bomb is zero. This thrilling and heart-pounding look at the psychology¹¹ of bomb technicians and the effects of risk and danger on the human psyche¹² is a fictional¹³ tale inspired by real events by journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded¹⁴ with a special bomb unit in Iraq. In Iraq, These men spoke¹⁵ of explosions as putting you in "the hurt locker".

 

The Hurt Locker premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Italy during 2008. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 2009 but received a more widespread theatrical¹⁶ release on July 24, 2009.

 

Because the film was not released in the United States until 2009, it was eligible¹⁷ for the 82nd Academy Awards, where it was nominated for nine Academy Awards. It won six Oscars, including Best Director for Bigelow, the first woman to win this award. It also won Best Picture. Boal won for Best Original Screenplay. The Hurt Locker earned numerous awards and honors from critics' organizations, festivals and groups, including six BAFTA Awards.

 

The Hurt Locker received near universal critical acclaim¹⁸. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 97% based on a sample of 209 reviews, with a weighted mean score of 8.4 out of 10. It was the second highest-rated film in 2009 at Rotten Tomatoes, behind Pixar's up with 98%. Rotten Tomatoes wrote of the critics' consensus¹⁹, "A well-acted, intensely shot, action filled war epic²⁰, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best reviewed of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War." Metacritic, which assigns a rating normalized to 100 to reviews from mainstream²¹ critics, reported that the film has received an average score of 94/100 based on 35 reviews.

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