Since it germinated in earnest four years ago, the crop of Afghanistan and Iraq films has been anemic. Reading the reviews, in most cases, is more entertaining than watching the films themselves. Take for instance the hastily braided Lions for Lambs by Robert Redford, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. It has three fifths the narrative breadth of Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel. But whereas Iñarritu ties his storylines together with raw emotion, Redford lashes his together with wonkishness. This comes from Anthony Lane’s review of Lions in the New Yorker:

“The three stories are intercut throughout the film, to lend it at least the illusion of momentum. Sadly, unless you are Jean-Luc Godard, the sight of your characters discussing the political ethics of their own actions is unlikely to ravish the eye, and Lions for Lambs is most charitably described as Ibsen with helicopters. It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns to ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling.”

Last year the indomitable men behind The Wire—David Simon and Ed Burns—managed to put together something of a masterpiece on the invasion of Iraq for HBO. But Generation Kill was still a political film. One came away after eight hours feeling the war was a horrendous mistake and that the incursion wasn’t as simple as an earthquake; after we’d sacked the cities, we couldn’t just fix the roads and bridges. Generation Kill is an indictment of the Bush Administration, just as The Wire is an indictment of Baltimore’s bureaucracies. In both series there are good men and women doing bad things and achieving dismal results.

The Hurt Locker is another sort of film. It follows the fate of three soldiers in Iraq charged with disarming IEDs in Baghdad. Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) replaces Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) after Thompson is killed in the line of duty. James is as unconcerned with danger as James Bond is with venereal disease, and he approaches his work with the spiritual calm of a man raking a rock garden. What is immediately evident watching The Hurt Locker is that the film is existential rather than polemical. The soldiers aren’t interested in why they’re in country. The other men on James’ team—Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are concerned only with surviving till they leave. James, on the other hand, seems captivated by his work and pursues it with the Platonic conviction that all labor is ethically sound if done excellently.

For someone opposed to the war from the first rumors, this film served as a revelation. There is nothing romantic about The Hurt Locker. It is not a sentimental portrait of brotherhood (the soldiers bond by drinking and punching each other in the stomach). And yet somewhere within the first half hour I found myself wishing I were with them in the desert. The soldiers’ work is arduous, to say nothing of being deadly, but James’ approach to defusing his bombs is elegantly simple. He appears at peace working, and that calm amidst one of the tensest dramas in recent film history is intoxicating. He is not so different from the poet striving to write a clear image.

There are minor flaws, of course. We’re so prepared for the films’ first explosion that when the bomb does go off, the surprise is no greater than if we’d seen a controlled building demolition. It produces none of the shock, for instance, one feels in the opening minutes of Children of Men, when the sudden blast interrupts an otherwise peaceful London street. Alfonso Cuarón’s violence conveys the emotion of terrorism, whereas Kathryn Bigelow’s violence, at least in the beginning, celebrates the science. But Bigelow is certainly at her career best, here. The camerawork throughout is redolent of Paul Greengrass’ United 93—hand-held, but to a specific end. Unlike César Charlone’s photography in The Constant Gardener, where he shook the camera even at the dinner table, the look of The Hurt Locker is both effectively intimate and unsettling. This is not a film of pretty photographs, nor should it be.

I’m not the first to predict that people will study The Hurt Locker in twenty years for clues to the nature of the Iraq war, but I’d like to add my endorsement. This film is a document rather than a lesson. By avoiding the political fray, it gives viewers insight, regardless of perspective, into the objective circumstances of the conflict. The Hurt Locker doesn’t ask whether we made the right decision going into Baghdad, and yet it doesn’t skirt the subject. Rather it proves how impertinent such a question is to the soldiers risking their lives. On a personal level, war is a series of tasks one tries to complete alive. Anything beyond that is a distraction.

By Kaelan Smith

Within the first fifteen minutes of Sin Nombre, El Casper (Edgar Flores), as a father might teach his son to hold a bat, helps the twelve-year-old El Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) shoot a captive, rival gang member in the face with a homemade pipe gun. Killing an enemy is the second right of passage into the Mara Salvatrucha brotherhood (the first is getting beaten by a group of men for thirteen seconds). In one of the few moments of reprieve in the film, the director Cary Fukunaga chooses not to show the actual dismembering of the body. But a moment later we see the entrails dropped into a bowl for the dogs to eat.

Sin Nombre is Fukunaga’s first feature effort. He has been deservedly applauded for his debut, if for no other reason than he’s a Scando-Japanese American, and his subjects in the film are Hispanic and speak colloquial Spanish. To work in Honduras and Mexico with a foreign cast is at the very least ambitious, and makes Joe Swanberg look cowardly for keeping his inert characters in an American bedroom. There is no timidity to Fukunaga’s style, nor is there much flare.

Compared to last years’ Slumdog Millionaire, in which Danny Boyle exhibited all the directorial tenderness of a suicide bomber, Sin Nombre is quieter—and more shocking. Trying to appreciate Boyle’s India was like touring Mumbai during a volcanic eruption. Boyle wouldn’t train the camera on a subject longer than it took to film a line of dialogue, and the frenetic pace was distracting rather than compelling. Even when the proprietor of the orphanage blinds one of his wards with acid, with the camera cutting back and forth, you feel at best a sentimental horror. But you don’t experience any more agony than you would smell curry had Boyle rubbed cardamon on the lens. The violence in Sin Nombre, though, as portrayed by the cinematographer Adriano Goldman, is austere, and the tragedies haunting the characters feel abrupt, senseless, and frightening; in other words, authentic.

Slumdog was a financial success for the same reason that it was an artistic failure: it skimmed, both cinematographically and emotionally, over its subjects. It purported to be about class struggle in India, and the requisite horrors of poverty. But instead it was a shiny, loud, and clean fairytale. Slumdog overcame tragedy, but the adversity dramatized was so disingenuous that the triumph seemed saccharine at worst, and shallow at best. A lot of people, though, must have seen Boyle’s allegory as fresh and optimistic, and the film rode that sentiment to the Oscars.

Sin Nombre, on the other hand, earns its catharsis. That’s in part because the ablution is less complete, and the expurged sins more abhorrent. The characters and their struggles seem real, in no small part because many of the actors hail from the neighborhoods where the film was shot. Some of the Mareros in the film are Mareros in real life; they didn’t need fake tattoos. But that is not to say the film is flawless. The acting is consistently solid, but Flores—the nucleus of Sin Nombre—as the quiet and brooding Casper, feels inaccessible. Even when he opens up, briefly near the end of the film, we see only a moment of warmth, and this softer disposition isn’t completely convincing. It’s preceded by too much unmitigated rage.

For all the murderers and rapists and rape victims that populate the film, only Lil Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), the leader of the local Mara Salvatrucha gang, displays exquisite dynamism. He vacillates between tenderness and brutality, and at his best, holds onto both emotions simultaneously. He is as ominous a character to look at as I can remember—his face is black with tattoos—but early in the film, while overseeing Casper and Smiley as they shoot the prisoner in the face, he holds his infant son proudly, kissing him on the forehead. The scene gains all its power from this juxtaposition of paternal love and unapologetic violence. The murder, made all the more horrible by the presence of the boy (who we know must grow up to be a killer like his father), lays out the ethics of the film: honor is paramount, and each life has a shifting, unequal value.

This is exceptionally difficult material to handle in a first film. If at the end I felt somewhat disconnected from El Casper—whom we follow from Tepachula to the Texas border—I wonder if it wasn’t Fukunaga’s intention. After all, Sin Nombre is not a film about absolution. It is about immigration and violence and the trappings of poverty. Rather than cauterizing wounds like Boyle did with Slumdog, Fukunaga opens them further. He doesn’t canonize his characters, because every act of heroism is bound to an act of cowardice. Accordingly, Sin Nombre is not a charming film. It doesn’t make you feel better for having seen it. And that’s why it’s important.

By Kaelan Smith