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A scene from the Oscar-nominated film The Hurt Locker - Source: ONE News -
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World War II produced Oscar winner The Bridge over the River Kwai.
The Vietnam war was immortalized on screen by Academy Award
winners The Deer Hunter and Platoon.
Now the Iraq conflict has inspired The Hurt Locker - a low-budget,
independently -made movie that is enjoying a level of industry
success that has eluded other Hollywood films about America's
ongoing military mission in the Middle East.
The Hurt Locker, the tense tale of US bomb disposal experts in
Iraq, heads into Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony not only as a
best picture front-runner but as one of the best reviewed movies of
2009 and with 67 awards under its belt.
Where Hurt Locker has succeeded - and other Iraq-themed films like
Body of Lies, Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah have failed - is
due to a combination of a good story, timing, and the transcendence
of politics, experts say.
"Most of the earlier movies about the Iraq war had some overt
political message that was generally critical of the war and the
reasons for getting into it," said Todd Boyd, professor of critical
studies at the University of Southern California.
"This is in many ways a traditional war film. The lead character is
a gung-ho American soldier.
But it is not overtly critical.
It has taken a political issue and turned it into a very
contemporary take on a genre film," Boyd said.
While perceptions of the film's authenticity have been mixed among
members of the US military, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has
been a supporter.
"This is the first Iraq war movie that he has liked, or for that
matter seen," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told the Los
Angeles Times.
"In looking at all previous films, he thought they had too much
of a political agenda."
Time, distance ease anxiety
Success at the Oscars for war-themed movies has normally come
several years after the end of a conflict.
Bridge Over the River Kwai won the best picture Oscar in 1957 - 12
years after the end of World War II - while Platoon took best
picture honors 13 years after US troops withdrew from Vietnam in
1973.
Helping Hurt Locker is the fact that while soldiers are still
deployed in Iraq and fighting a major war in Afghanistan, Iraq has
been eclipsed by worries over the US economy and the US healthcare
reform debate in newspapers and TV reports.
"There are changing attitudes about the war, and one of them is
that it seems to be a fact of life that we may be living with for a
long time," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at
Syracuse University.
Dave Karger, film writer for Entertainment Weekly, said that when Hurt Locker first made the rounds at film festivals in 2008, it seemed like any other Iraq war movie.
But when finally released by independent studio Summit
Entertainment in the summer of 2009, it stood apart from previous
films.
"The others had something of a Hollywood gloss. Rendition in 2007
was populated by A-list stars (Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal),
so it was easy to be distracted from the points it was making,"
Karger said.
Despite its award success, Hurt Locker has failed to hit it big at
global box offices.
Its ticket sales stand at a mere $26.5 million - the sort of low
figure that persuades studios making big-budget movies that Iraq is
not worth an investment.
An independent like Summit, however, makes a business of assuming
the risk of low-budget films and hopes critical acclaim and awards
come later, which is exactly what happened.
