A Love Letter to Kathryn Bigelow

To the Most Exceedingly Accomplished Kathryn Bigelow,

To begin, I must congratulate you on the success of The Hurt Locker, and the critical recognition that it has received since its release. In truth, I wish it was a more financially successful movie in the way that I wish every movie I enjoy was financially successful, since I wish good fortune on the things that I enjoy. What I am pleased about is that the organizations that hand out awards have actually realized the utter and inescapable awesomeness of the film and I firmly believe you should be given the Best Director Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards.

However, the themes and content present in The Hurt Locker are things that seem, to me anyway, to have been present in your films in the past. Namely, dudes ON THE EDGE doing things that are against the rules, resulting in profuse sweating, punches to the face, explosions, and intensely manly conversations between two sweaty and gravely-voiced dudes who are ON THE EDGE. Holy crap, I love this stuff to death. I am not belittling your films in any way, this is the kind of thing I expect from action films and you deliver them in glorious amounts. You combined westerns with vampires in Near Dark, and that was before everyone and their grandma’s second cousin was making vampire movies/TV shows/brain-shriveling “books”. It was graphic and grim and filthy and had Lance Henriksen, President of the Gritty Talkers Club himself, in it. Sure, it also had Bill Paxton, but I won’t hold that against you.

For celluloid’s sake, you have Patrick Swayze throw a dog at Keanu Reeves in one of your movies. HOW CAN I NOT BE IN LOVE?!?!?! It is impossible. You were even able to cast two of the manliest men to ever stare intensely at stuff in the history of cinema, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, in the woefully underrated K-19: The Widowmaker. Despite the unfortunate choice of having them speak in English with Russian accents (please tell me how this makes sense, I mean, the characters are supposed to be speaking in Russian anyway, wouldn’t it be simpler just to have the actors speak unaccented?), I enjoyed the hell out of this film. It features the only antagonist worthy of the team of Ford and Neeson besides each other (if they were dating, would the tabloids call them Feeson? Harriam?): the laws of physics. Radiation from their own submarine’s reactor bombards them, and they basically tell each and every gamma ray to shove it up its own ionizing ass. That’s right, their steely-eyed gaze changes the fundamentals of the universe. On set, did Harrison Ford ever cause someone to travel through time by punching him or her in the face?

In The Hurt Locker, SSG William James is even more ON THE EDGE than Johnny Utah or Captain Alexei Vostrikov. More importantly, you don’t let the fact that James is supposed to be diffusing bombs prevent you from including numerous and enormous explosions in the film. You gathered a cast of mostly unknown yet universally talented actors and it is a thrill to see them sweat profusely as they get real close to each other’s faces and yell intense things.

Maybe some critics gripe about how The Hurt Locker is just another action film or that it’s another Iraq War movie that hardly anyone saw in the theaters. This is crap. The Hurt Locker is thrilling, it makes its audience pay attention, it gets them involved in its story. It also features nuanced characterization and the revelation of personal anguish in its protagonists as they struggle to survive war without sacrificing their humanity, only to realize, in the case of William James, that he can only feel like a fully-formed human while participating in the humanity-destroy activity of war.

Other, more eloquent individuals have gushed over this film for such reasons, but I wanted to gush over how it’s also pretty badass.

With eternal gratitude,
-John Arminio

P.S. Fuck Avatar.