"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

　　This quote, lifted from renowned Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges‘ book ‘War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning‘ (2002), is the text that opens Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker - itself scripted by journalist Mark Boal and drawn from his experiences embedded with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in Iraq in 2004. Viewers would do well, amidst the high-tension chaos that follows, to remember Hedges‘ words, as they represent one of the only verbal articulations of the film‘s principal theme. Like all the best directors, Bigelow prefers showing to telling, and so she immerses viewers in a physical, moral and psychological landscape that is always compelling to watch, but never so easy to read.

　　The introductory sequence, reminiscent of the opening of 2007‘s Beaufort which dealt with the South Lebanon conflict, barely gives viewers time to register that team leader Sergeant Thompson is played by Guy Pearce before he is killed when the improvised explosive device that he is trying to disarm is remotely detonated. Later Ralph Fiennes will have a similar, and similarly short-lived, cameo - so short, in fact, that his character is not even named. Here, in the guerrilla warfare on the streets of US-occupied Baghdad, life is frail, all men are vulnerable to sudden attack, and death equalises even the big-name actors in the cast.

　　No sooner have Thompson‘s body and belongings been packed away in their white box than his replacement arrives in the form of Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), whose ways in the field are soon unnerving the surviving EOD unit members, by-the-book Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and death-fearing Specialist Owen Eldridge.