Hurt Blocker

I have been lured out of semi-retirement by the news that The Hurt Locker comprehensively beat Avatar in the Oscar 2010 competition.

For once, I'm in a position to comment as I've seen both the films. I saw Avatar at the cinema in all its 3-D glory, while I watched The Hurt Locker on DVD at the weekend.

Frankly, people, I'm baffled. Avatar was by no means faultless - the characters were somewhat two-dimensional (in ironic opposition to the film); the love story was a bit soupy; the lead male character was irritating rather than heroic. But the message of the film - albeit delivered in rather a clunky way - was 24 carat gold. Exploitative colonialism is wrong, m'kay? The rights of indigenous people always trump the greed and rapine of faceless corporations. Twelve foot-tall blue aliens can be immensely sexy. An awareness of the interconnectedness of natural processes needs to be an indispensable part of human consciousness.

Leaving aside the characters, the story and the messages, the film itself, as a visual spectacle, is simply magnificent. I've seen one or two 3-D films before, and been entirely unmoved by the experience. The 3-D experience of Avatar, on the other hand, is like going from a 15-inch 405-line black-and-white TV set circa 1963 to a top-of-the-range 50" plasma screen circa 2010. For the first twenty minutes of the film I was absent my jaw - I had been entirely sucked into the computer-generated world. Normally I find that I can admire the surface of such a film - Monsters Inc, for example - without warming at all to the content. But this film was different - for me, at any rate, it was wholly believable. The objects (the dragons, for example) had a quiddity and a heft that was missing in a film like The Lord Of The Rings, whose Orcs did not come to life in the same way. How much of this was due to improvements in rendering, and how much to the 3-D I neither know nor care.

And then there's The Hurt Locker. I wanted to like this film, having enjoyed Katheryn Bigelow's Point Break and her earlier Blue Steel. But it was a truly dire, woeful film. For a start there was zero tension which, in a film that seeks to portray the perils of dealing with unexploded ordinance, is a pretty unimpressive achievement. After the first ten minutes Mrs Rot turned to me and echoed my own thoughts beautifully when she said "How are they going to stretch this out to two hours?" Stretch, I'm afraid, was the operative word. The action was stretched, but not to breaking point, more to "where's my book - I'll just finish my chapter" point. There were only three characters, about none of whom it was possible to care a jot. Had Guy Pearce survived, the film might have been a great deal better. As it was, his replacement was about as believable as Mr Incredible. Again the characters were all ciphers - the disposal expert addicted to adrenaline, his ramrod-straight, do-it-by-the-book colleague, and their underling about whom I can only remember one thing, which would spoil the "plot" (if it had a proper plot) were I to give it away. There was a blatantly tacked-on bit about an Iraqi boy who disappears, which I didn't believe at all. Also, in common with most films of the genre (The Deer Hunter, for example) there was a section dealing with life away from the conflict, which contained only one interesting fact - that one of the characters was married to Kate from Lost. Yes folks, it was that riveting. Finally, and in some ways most disappointingly, it was a deeply conservative film - unquestioning about the role of America in Iraq, simply interested in trying (and, for me at least, failing) to highlight the danger and stress of the role of bomb disposal teams.

So how did the Academy (and BAFTA before it) get it so wrong? I think there's an element of intellectual snobbery here - Avatar is already one of the most successful films in history, whereas the theatrical release of The Hurt Locker was seen by about forty two people. Much easier to big up your critical cred by voting for a small-budget semi-arthouse film over an established blockbuster. James Cameron's previous film was Titanic, which foisted that Celine Dion song on the world, and so maybe there was also an element of revenge. Cameron and Bigelow were once married, and that gave the Oscar fight all the tension that was lacking in The Hurt Locker. Finally, the Academy has form in this area, having many times ignored an obviously superior film in favour of one that is now rightly neglected.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. Avatar will be seen by millions more people than The Hurt Locker which will enjoy a brief flurry of interest in DVD sales and rentals. I would urge you to go and watch Avatar while it's still in cinemas - it demands to be seen larger-than-life. I would urge you to watch Jarhead instead of The Hurt Locker. It may be about the previous Iraq adventure, but it's a much, much better film.