'The Hurt Locker' an uncomfortable reminder of how little humans have evolved

By Mayank Chhaya, If the largely fictional archetypal caveman can be dated back to the Neanderthal 30,000 years ago, then the movie 'The Hurt Locker' is an embarrassing reminder about how little the human race has traveled since then.

Although the setting of the movie, its weaponry and its bomb disposal squad's suit all appear very 21st century, they barely hide its primal impulses. At its core the plot is really quite basic-it is about killing before getting killed. And yet we do not tire of telling ourselves about the dawn of the 21st century and all the fabulous human achievement it is supposed to herald.

It is ironic that the helmet that the bomb disposer wears in the movie even resembles the Neanderthal skull from a certain angle.

As movies in the war genre go, director Kathryn Bigelow delivers a visceral and wrenching product, which may or may not be entirely accurate in its depiction of the harrowing job that the US Army's Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) squad members do. However, its relentless manner of telling the story of the protagonist Staff Sergeant William James, played with palpable if annoying hubris by Jeremy Renner, going about disarming explosives in Iraq is very effective.

Muscles, both of the viewer as well as the cast, remain tight and tense throughout the film. That tension is powerfully captured in the scene where Sergeant J T Sanborn (the quietly credible Anthony Mackie) and James systematically gun down insurgent snipers at a desert location. The sand in Mackie's eyelashes and his squinted eyes in the face of the sharp tobacco hued desert sun send a heat wave down those viewing it.

While all those strengths are highly commendable, the movie remains a series of severely fused images, most of them about disarming of explosives in various neighborhoods. The larger point that has not been discussed in the generally exultant reviews worldwide may not be germane to the plot but it is inescapable. At a time when the world is supposed to be in the midst of the information/knowledge century, where people are supposed to use information and other technologies in search of a loftier human purpose, "The Hurt Locker" underscores the fundamental folly of that message.

The scene where an innocent man, strapped up with a vest full of explosives, pleading Sergeant James to free him destroys any notions of human evolution since the putative caveman. That the Neanderthal may actually have been far more intelligent and sophisticated than they are given credit for is a moot point here.

Even James' brief and uncomfortable return home helps one feel what a Neanderthal man might have felt in the midst of the humdrum domesticity of his cave after the thrill of hunting a wooly mammoth. When James goes to a supermarket and stands looking befuddled at the endless row of cereal brands, one almost empathizes with his plight of missing out on the thrill of diffusing improvised explosive devices.

Whether or not "The Hurt Locker" wins any or all the Oscars it has been nominated for this Sunday is unlikely to soften its unintended message of how the human race remains trapped in the biology of violence. So much so that even those who are responsible for thwarting the march of those primal impulses, like Sergeant James, cannot resist the pure thrill which results from that violence.