Into The Bigelow-Boal-verse

 Some premises which require some level of buy-in for this to make sense: 

1. Kathryn Bigelow was always a talented director in the action and thriller spaces.
2. Kathryn Bigelow was largely ignored by the film world until she started making action thrillers out of "important" true stories.

 It turns out the gap between a silly cop thriller and multiple Oscar wins is having the silly cop serve in the Iraq War! This is half a joke. The other half is criticism of Mark Boal's writing. Boal is a journalist, and probably a very good one, but as a screenwriter his characters are as boring and vague as his scenarios are thrilling and specific. 

 "The Hurt Locker" is easily the best thing he's wrote, probably because it was an adaptation of his own on-the-ground journalism, but even that feels quite poor at times. I have two opposing feelings on "The Hurt Locker". Firstly, if you use the Ebert rule and grade the movie on what it is and not what it isn't, it's stellar. This is a fantastic thriller about a guy who defuses bombs. Bigelow snatched Paul Greengrass' cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, and successfully out-Greengrassed anything he's done. The camera is shaky and the cutting is frantic in a way that actually succeeds at the "you're really there!" style of action movies so common in the 2000s. The almost on-location photography (Jordan substitutes for Iraq) feels hot, another common trend of the time that was usually handled quite poorly in Hollywood but which Bigelow executes brilliantly. I think most of that effect comes from literally one shot, when a fly swarms onto Jeremy Renner's eye. The world is full of filmmakers who spend their whole career trying to execute a shot that good, and here Bigelow gets it in what I assume is a happy accident. Every scene where a bomb is being defused is perfect.

 Unfortunately, at some point in the film's second hour the realization sets in that this is just a thriller about a guy who defuses bombs. There's no Iraqi perspective, there's no broader perspective of the what or the why of the war, and there's not even a terribly compelling character. The movie doesn't need all of those things, but when it wins Best Picture you would expect it to have at least one. Renner is a maverick cowboy who doesn't play by the rules of protocol, but it's okay because he's doing it for the "right" reasons, and even when his intuition is wrong the biggest mistake he makes is mild survivable friendly fire. He's a very basic renegade cop character transposed into a war movie. Boal's main attempt to deepen the story, a revenge hunt for the killers of an Iraqi boy, is a laughable turn in a film that otherwise takes a lot of pride in its realism. Boal's main theme, that war is an addictive experience, is told directly to the audience with a "war is a drug" on-screen quote right at the start. The film is somewhat critical of these adrenaline junkies, but it takes far too much joy in heart-pounding set pieces for anyone to ever stop and talk about how they feel. "The Hurt Locker" is a good movie! It's just one that's weirdly devoid of scope, or commentary, or really anything worth thinking about after seeing it. It's especially weird that film critics and awards voters were so happy to shower it with praise, when you think about how the bar for what makes a good war film has shifted and matured ever since the Vietnam days.

 Some accused "The Hurt Locker" of being pro-military propaganda, but the film is so obviously uninterested in politics of any kind that it was basically able to sneak past that diss (if you think all war movies that show only one perspective and don't criticize it are inherently propaganda, then sure, "The Hurt Locker" is that). That same accusation became the main thing to effect the "Zero Dark Thirty" discourse. The 2012 follow-up takes a similar "just doing my job" approach to the military operation in the Middle East, except instead of a bomb diffuser who uses his hothead tactics to save civilians, we have a movie about CIA employees who sometimes use hothead tactics to torture some folks. Maybe the environment the movie came out in was different (although frankly I doubt this. The Iraq war was roughly 60% vs 40% leaning unpopular in 2009, as it was for basically the entire 8 years of the Obama presidency, and a 2013 poll on whether it was worth going to Afghanistan wasn't all that much higher), or maybe the difference is that a bomb diffuser who only picks up a gun when he has to is much more palatable than the CIA. Either way, the neutrally positive slant which Mark Boal's script gives to the part of history where the CIA tortured people in Guantanamo Bay and maybe or maybe didn't get useful information to hunt down Osama bin Laden made "Zero Dark Thirty" the most controversial film of the year. How is the movie? Not nearly good enough for all the discussion!

 Bigelow was given an impossible task: making the raid on bin Laden's hideout look cinematic. I think she failed, which is unfortunate because it mostly proves that nobody in the world would have been capable of pulling it off. The jittery camerawork that felt so effective in the cities and deserts of "The Hurt Locker" looks uninspired thru the night-vision lens of marines. I think the reason why is very simple. The former was shot outdoors, with great lighting, and the latter was shot with no lighting at all to maximize realism. I can't say I care enough about realism to ignore how ugly it looks on a big screen. And the premise itself just isn't very compelling as a thriller. As a drama, it's fine enough I suppose, mostly because Jessica Chastain is a talented actress working at her peak. But as a thriller? Chastain spends the better part of two hours trying to convince her bosses that her theory is right. Her theory is right, of course, and the audience knows her theory is right, because it's a recent true story, and because for better or worse the movie isn't interested in giving us reasons to think she might be wrong. There's no suspense here. 

 After an awful lot of political criticism from the left, Boal and Bigelow teamed up a third time to tackle the 1967 Detroit riots. On paper, this is a good fit, because it's an important true story that lends itself well to intense action scenes, and as a bonus anyone who identifies as a dove will appreciate a story of police brutality. So gosh, I feel bad for saying that "Detroit" is a slog. Like all of these films, there's very little depth, very little interest in slowing down the re-creation of real events to think about big picture themes. The police raid on a group of innocent black men in a cheap hotel is queasy, but it's not the fun kind of queasy that "The Hurt Locker" is, because the people you're rooting for are totally powerless to stop the tragedy. The ensemble cast is much too large for any individual character to have much personality. The courtroom chunk of the film is a bit too long for how extremely dull it is. 

 Is there anything that really clicks in "Detroit"? Will Poulter's performance as Racist Cop #1 works for sure, which is almost more awkward than if nothing in the movie worked. He's terrifying, which that character is supposed to be in every movie like this one, but Poulter is exceptionally good at it. At times he feels like a supervillain racist cop, with a master plan to lynch black people and get away with it that's several steps ahead of even his own men. He knows precisely what kind of killing he can get away with and what kind of killing could cause bad attention, which is the most fearsome bit of all. There's a sort of interesting metatextual element in Jason Mitchell's character. Bigelow/Boal movies have, to this point, rewarded loose cannon cowboys. Here, Mitchell is a wannabe renegade who gets unceremoniously offed. That kind of person only works out in real life when there's an immense power backing up their questionable decision making. Other than that? It's a mediocre capstone for a type of historical action thriller that had gone well out of style by that point.