On Taking Risks

I raved about Korea's fast internet service in my last post because I really wanted to see the movie that beat Avatar in the run for Oscar’s Best Picture and the director who beat James Cameron. I went ahead and took a copy using Torrent. I know, I am normally not in the loop, so I got to watch the movie only now. Haha.

Anyway, as to the winners of the 2010 Oscar’s, it’s the “Hurt Locker” for best movie and ex-wife of James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow for best director. Wow, that’s straight-in-your-face International Women’s Day that the world is celebrating on this date. Bigelow is said to be the first woman ever to win the “Best Director” title in the Oscar’s. Neat!

The Hurt Locker had a good choice of what to highlight in this world this time around, I must say. While Avatar went out in creating an entirely new planet, the movie kept itself grounded and delved into the souls of interesting creatures of the existing Earth. They’re not exactly the people you would immediately care about in knowing, for the place where these people are stuck is so dangerously stuck, too. I mean stuck in this endless rage of world war. War is something that we occasionally hear in the news, but even in the most infamous war site, Iraq (where the movie was set), people do not seem to already care (must’ve gotten numb) and seem to have become mere onlookers. I had to notice that in the movie, a number of scenes showed Iraqi women and children peeping though their windows and looking through their balconies as if watching explosions has been a long-time choice for live entertainment.

Okay, so there are these talks about oil and weapons of mass destruction and power and Iraq and America. And here come these bomb specialists who go on performing the skills they were luckily (or unluckily) given, but for different reasons and motivations. What I think the movie just wants to relay to us over-all is how taking risks in life has always been more fulfilling. Not to mention, how it can save our world.

It then got me thinking how the title, “The Hurt Locker” fits into all these. Then Will James’ character comes in. I think he is the one who lives up the most to taking risks in the movie. He sure came up as the reckless and apathetic soldier who goes on with his technical skill of defusing bombs, but what’s hidden in his character are "the hurts locked in his heart", which is even literally manifested in this carton that he owns to put pieces of bomb paraphernalia that he’d choose to keep from those bombs that he gets to defuse. Awesome. Only in this guy can you see such ability to keep all the hurt and continue wanting more of it. Such adrenaline. Such risk that he is willing to take.