The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film follows a bomb disposal team in Iraq without building a plot around them: each mission is a closed unit. Mark Boal wrote it after embedding with such a team as a journalist in 2004, then publishing a magazine piece. Moving the shoot from Morocco to Jordan cut an initial thirty million dollar budget to about fifteen million, and forty four days around Amman with four Super 16 cameras running at once yielded roughly two hundred hours of footage. Suspense comes from how many angles exist and how long the cutting withholds them. Familiar faces are spent in small pieces: Guy Pearce dies in the opening scene, so you cannot read who is safe. The film won six Oscars: Best Picture, Directing, Writing (Original Screenplay), Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Jeremy Renner in Actor in a Leading Role, Barry Ackroyd in Cinematography and the score in Music (Original Score) were nominated only. Bigelow became the first woman to win Directing, on 7 March 2010, and producer Nicolas Chartier was barred from the ceremony for emailing campaign appeals to voters. A good fit if you want the defusal scenes held long and suspense carried by cutting rather than story. Not for anyone after procedural accuracy: serving disposal technicians publicly disputed the team’s methods.