![body heat movie bomb scene body heat movie bomb scene](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/29/world/29seals-sealsbw2/29seals-sealsbw2-facebookJumbo-v4.jpg)
No matter how many times she cuts away, you know exactly where James is in relation to a bomb-whether he’s in the kill zone or far enough away to be safe. This kind of immediacy is commonplace in action filmmaking, but, unlike so many directors today, who jam together crashes, explosions, and people sailing through the air in nonsensical montages of fantasy movement, Bigelow keeps the space tight and coherent. She wants us to be there, to feel the danger, the mystery. As Eldridge and Sanborn jerk their guns this way and that at a bomb scene, Bigelow, working with the great cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, jerks the camera around, too. In “The Hurt Locker,” there are no wasted shots or merely beautiful images.
![body heat movie bomb scene body heat movie bomb scene](https://www.refinery29.com/images/9967850.jpg)
As a filmmaker, Bigelow is still obsessed with violence, but she’s become a master at staging it.
![body heat movie bomb scene body heat movie bomb scene](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o66mUfzI3iw/hqdefault.jpg)
By the mid-nineties, I had her figured as a violence junkie with a strong tendency to stylize everything into stunning images that didn’t always mean much. Bigelow went into the ocean with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfer-crime movie “Point Break” (1991), and brought off scenes of languorously slo-mo destruction in the cultish sci-fi crime movie “Strange Days” (1995). The sequence hovered somewhere between fetish and parody. In her “Blue Steel” (1989), as Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a cop, geared up for a day’s work, Bigelow focussed on her revolver, her leather holster, and her shoes, in gleaming closeup. In the past, Kathryn Bigelow, now fifty-seven, has outdone the macho movie boys at their own game. The two men feel entirely vulnerable they both admire and detest James, who pulls them into situations they would rather leave to someone else. Which of them is hostile, which friendly, which merely curious? The two other members of James’s team, the frightened young Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and the wary, experienced Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), cover James, screaming at anyone who moves. As James goes in, slowly, under a hot sun, treading like a spaceman through trash-filled streets, people gather in doorways or look out windows. We’ve seen James’s predecessor die on the job: a man watching him from a nearby store detonated a bomb with a cell phone.
Body heat movie bomb scene how to#
Over and over, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), following a tip-off, walks to a bomb site in a heavy protective suit and tries to figure out how to pull apart clumsily tangled wires and flimsy triggering devices. “The Hurt Locker” narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat. The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt. Bigelow stages one prolonged and sinister shoot-out in the desert, but the movie couldn’t be called a combat film, nor is it political, except by implication-a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene. The film, from a script by Mark Boal, has a new subject: the heroism of the men who defuse improvised explosive devices, sloppily made but lethal bombs planted under a bag or a pile of garbage or just beneath the dirt of a Baghdad street. But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is the most skillful and emotionally involving picture yet made about the conflict. The Iraq war has been dramatized on film many times, and those films have been ignored just as many times by theatre audiences.