Hurt Locker Case Study Research

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Produced by Kathryn Bigelow

                      Mark Boal                                                                                         

                                                                                                                              

                 Nicholas Chartier

                 Greg Shapiro

Written by Jeremy Renner
                    Anthony Mackie
                    Brian Geraghty
                  

Cast            Jeremy Renner
                  Anthony Mackie
                  Brian Geraghty
                  Christian Camargo
                  Evangeline Lilly
                  Ralph Fiennes
                  David Morse
                  Guy Pearce

Genre       War/ Thriller/Action/Drama

Budget     $15 Million

Box Office $49,230,772

Brief outline of the film: Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb.
The Hurt Locker is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004.  In terms of the main characters, Bigelow made a point of casting relatively unknown actors: "it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability”. The film was shot in Jordan within miles of the Iraqi border, to achieve Bigelow's goal of authenticity. Iraqi refugees were used for extras and the cast worked in the unmistakable heat of the Middle East. The filmmakers had scouted for locations in Morocco, but director Kathryn Bigelow felt its cities did not resemble Baghdad. In addition, she wanted to get as close to the war zone as possible. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraq border. She had wanted to shoot in Iraq, but the production security team could not guarantee their safety from snipers. Bigelow sought to immerse audiences "into something that was raw, immediate and visceral". Boal's screenplay had a non-traditional, asymmetrical, episodic structure. There was no traditional "villain", and tension was derived from the characters' internal conflicts and the suspense from the explosives and snipers. The film received a score of 97% based on a sample of 209 reviews in the Rotten Tomatoes with a mean score of 8.4 out of 10. It was second highest-rated film in 2009 at Rotten Tomatoes.