Two-plus hours of complete engagement - The Hurt Locker

Finally saw "The Hurt Locker," a surprising, still, choice for Best Picture, atypical of most winners and probably the beneficiary of backlast against the blockbuster frontrunner, Avatar. Hurt Locker is really good if not quite great. On the plus, it's absolutely 2+ hours of complete tension and engagement, without a sense of exploitation, gratuitous violence, or video-game extravagance. It feels totally real, genuine, as if you're in the boots of the men on the ground in Iraq, in this case a three-man team of bomb-disposal experts. One scene or episode after another entirely holds you, and you're thinking how can she (Katherine [?] Bigelow) keep this up? How can she maintain not just the pace - that's relatively easy - but the tension and intensity? She does - an amazing case of directing (and editing) in that none of the scenes (except a domestic scene near the end) is typical of most movies, dialogue, stills, etc. - they're all in action, in motion, on the job, and for this job a lot of the tension involves not chases and explosions but stillness and silence. Terrific movie, in that respect. If it has a flaw, it's that, by the time you're done, the story line is pretty simple, even simplistic. Yes, it's about three soldiers and how the war affects each of them in different ways, and we do get to know them, a little, by seeing them in action. But we don't know any of them deeply, they don't open up and aren't meant to do so, and we don't really see them change - they are fixed types at the outset of the movie and at the end, still. The main character, James, is enigmatic, sometimes a total bastard and then, in one scene in particular, quite solicitous - I didn't really understand these shifts and the movie doesn't plumb to his depths. It doesn't need to, really. It's a nearly great movie, and it can't be all things - if it wallowed too much in the psyche of each character, it would ruin the intensity and pace and be just another war (or antiwar) film.