“The Hurt Locker” kicks off with a quote from Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug”. The text dissolves to black save for “war is a drug”, and this is what “The Hurt Locker” turns out to be: a look into one soldier’s addiction to war. Director Kathryn Bigelow follows bomb specialist William James as he arrives in Bravo Company to replace a fallen predecessor. The setting is Iraq, about a year into the war. James leads a group of three: himself, Sanborn, a consummate pro, and Eldridge, a fresh-faced grunt spooked with guilt after what he perceives as his failure to save the slain bomb specialist. Baghdad insurgents keep them busy with IUDs hidden around the city. This is a more or less complete summary of the movie, which is why it’s surprising that “The Hurt Locker” is easily the best film yet about the war in Iraq and the nature of professional soldiering in the twenty-first century.

Bigelow opens with a tense scene in which Staff Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce) is killed in action attempting to detonate explosives left in a city square. Here’s a bomb defusing scene to end all bomb defusing scenes. There’s the classic unexploded bomb and the person charged with defusing it (or in this case blowing it up safely). But the defuser wears a heavy kevlar suit, bulky and unwieldy, giving him the look and mobility of a deep sea diver or an astronaut on a moonwalk. The square is surrounded on all sides with open windows in which there are Iraqis watching. Some of these might be civilian onlookers. Others might be terrorists waiting to detonate the ex—plosives via remote control by dialing digits on a cell phone. The bomb unit conducts itself professionally—this is just another day at the office—using protocols and tools (including a small robot) they’ve deployed many times before. This only adds to the tension. Something’s about to go wrong, and the longer the scene goes on, the more aware the viewer is of just how many tiny changes could cause big and disastrous results. Bigelow allows the scene to marinate in its own insanity, brilliantly exploiting the native dramatic tension on a gut level while giving us time to think about the situation down to each harrowing detail.

Such is the film’s unique approach to telling James’ story in the foreground while subtly laying out the groundwork for the larger story about the Iraq war. There is no plot to speak of, only a series of perilous episodes. One dangerous situation after another unfolds without building toward a climax. Perhaps this is truer to the soldier’s experience of war. At one point the movie detours into a more human story, focusing on James’ friendship with a young Iraqi boy who sells DVDs to troops on the perimeter of the Army base. He takes a liking to the fast-talking kid hawking bootleg DVDs, only to fall into the grip of incendiary rage when he finds the boy’s corpse used as a “body bomb” by terrorists. James turns detective, sneaking off the base on a scary night mission to bring the boy’s killers to justice, but the ensuing complications are anti-climactic dead-ends. In this Bigelow hints at the wider story going on in Iraq: each episode is self-contained, seeming to advance nothing, part of a series of isolated incidents that don’t seem to do much in the way of helping or hurting the war effort. These guys aren’t taking hills or storming beach-heads. What kind of war are they fighting, then?

For James, the war is a personal mission of some kind. He never states why he’s there. Maybe there is no “why”; conflict does indeed show up like a drug addiction on Jeremy Renner’s soft, expressive features. After his tour is up, he’s sent back to the States to try and rebuild his personal life with his wife and infant son. In a single shot of James standing in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, befuddled and bored in equal measure by the vast number of colorful products available to him, Bigelow depicts with funny immediacy the plight of the soldier who lives off the rush of war. James can’t go back to civilian life. Yet the scene is satirical, too. Once again Bigelow packs a bigger question (Iraq and America) into James’ singular story: just how big is the reality gap between bomb-ridden Iraq and suburban American life? If America is fighting an existential war against radical Islam, how can the home front look as cheerful and placid as this? “The Hurt Locker” invites us to think about these questions without preaching or strutting as a Message Movie. Bigelow trusts the film’s themes to resonate fully in viewers’ minds. Nothing is overtly political, but everything in James’ story urges reflection on what the war means.

James at least wants to be in Iraq. His colleague, Sanborn, is clearly committed to serving his country with honor and pride. Yet he doesn’t really know why he’s fighting, and his story is that of the sane man who is not addicted to war, as James is, as well as the soldier who rightfully wonders what he’s being asked to do. Anthony Mackie turns in a strong, stoic performance as the Sergeant who must deal with James’ thrill-seeking in the execution of his duties. They are at each other’s throats—literally, in one scene—yet James and Sanborn work together with flawless professionalism in the movie’s best scene, a desert shootout between snipers. The gunfight involves an exchange of only about a dozen bullets, but it drags out for what seems like an hour. Sanborn, almost statue-like behind his rifle, guards the team from insurgents a few hundred meters away. James spots for him with a scope. They lay on the ground, behind cover, sweltering in the heat, insects making a meal of them, waiting patiently to finish off their targets. Sanborn and James combine highly technical skill, patience, strength, improvisation, and tight teamwork to get through the incident. The scene is an awesome tribute to the Army’s skill and professionalism.

Yet, as with the rest of the movie, the scene can be read differently. The attack in the desert is random. Baghdad is miles away. The insurgents are protecting nothing but an abandoned home. As if to emphasize the blighted uselessness of the area, a herd of goats passes by. Three men, mercenaries, are killed by the insurgent sniper. Not for country, for money: they were bringing two rebels to the Coalition for 500 pounds, as we find out from the leader, played by Ralph Fiennes. The financial motivation is emphasized when Fiennes’ ’ contractor shoots them both in the back as the try to escape in the melee, quipping, “Five hundred quid dead or alive, I just remembered that”. The enemy snipers are faceless. They stand to gain nothing but a few KIAs. The Army gains nothing except the safe return of some soldiers. If Bigelow tilted this scene just slightly toward broad comedy, it would be easy to understand how ludicrous the skirmish really is. Because she sells it as an exciting war scene, though, the larger point is left open for interpretation: unexploded ordinance.

“The Hurt Locker” thus allows an appreciation for the work done by James, Sanborn and Eldridge as well as a fascinating look into the mind of a man who stares death in the face not in the howling frenzy of combat but coolly, slowly, deliberately, in an environment agonizingly subject to the ebb and flow of chance. This is a war movie without much war. The threat of the enemy is ghostly. Bigelow fills this “slow time” with an amazing and sure-handed command of details. As James works, Bigelow acquaints us with the smallest fragment of rubble to the city buildings surrounding the bomb site. When James must attempt to defuse a car bomb near a U.N. compound, Bigelow shows off a masterful understanding of the kind of insurgent warfare the soldiers experience in Baghdad. The suspense is all in the camera angles: POV shots from James’ level to various other POV shots including Sanborn and Eldridge, other U.S. soldiers, civilian gawkers, and possible terrorists hiding in the shadows. The sight-lines multiply into a geometry of fear until you almost forget the bomb itself.

Put simply, the enemy is unknown. The film steadfastly refuses to politicize itself, and in doing so highlights an almost surreal disconnection between the Army and the war itself. James is a professional doing his job. He’s addicted to his job, but in the end this is almost a secondary matter. The war in Iraq is self-sustaining. There’s a job to be done, and men and women to do it. The soldiers are imprisoned in bureaucratic bubbles. Bigelow doesn’t suggest that the soldiers are not aware of the mission to bring democracy to Iraq and fight Al-Qaeda, but by excluding this line of discussion from the film she leaves a gap which the audience is invited to complete. In a chilling paradox, the more professional, intelligent, skilled, and dedicated the soldiers seem, the more difficult it becomes to imagine them succeeding in Iraq. War is a drug; drugs are self-motivating. But if war is a job, in a sense the job itself is self-motivating, as well. James re-ups for another tour, running off a cargo plane with dozens of other soldiers as if stepping off an assembly line. “ “The Hurt Locker” is a picture of a war as mindless as it is endless.