HURT LOCKER, THE 163
box office returns in the UK). Commercially successful after a slow start, Hope and
Glory was honored with numerous film awards. These included 13 BAFTA nomi-
nations and 7 wins (for Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Susan Wooldridge; Best
Actor in a Supporting Role: Ian Bannen; Best Actress: Sarah Miles; Best Cinema-
tography: Philippe Rousselot; Best Costume Design: Shirley Russell; Best Direc-
tion: John Boorman; Best Editing: Ian Crafford); 5 Oscar nominations; and 3 Golden
Globe nominations and 1 win (Best Motion Picture— Comedy or Musical). Reviews
were uniformly strong.
Reel History Versus Real History
Like his fictional counterpart, Billy Rohan, John Boorman lived through The Blitz as
a small boy (the Rohans are a thinly disguised version of his own family). Intimately
familiar with life in suburban London during the war— his own experience, the
look of the streets, the fashions, the mores, the routine war mea sures (e.g., food
rationing, barrage balloons, air raid shelters, the effects of the bombings, etc.)—
Boorman created a historically au then tic movie that resonated deeply with Britons
who had lived through that era. He also created a refreshingly revisionist narrative
that ran counter to Britain’s monolithic official history of World War II as a righ-
teous strug gle against fascism, marked by resolute national fortitude and sacrifice.
As historian Geoff Eley astutely notes, “While deromanticizing the grand story of
‘the people’s war’ (‘according to folk memory... our last great collective achieve-
ment as a nation’), [Hope and Glory] also deploys a dif fer ent kind of romance, namely,
the private story of a young boy’s entry into experience, the opening of his expanded
horizons, via the interruption of ordinary life’s rhythms and repetitions. The film
tells this story by deliberately distancing the public script of the just and anti- fascist
war, because for most ordinary experience (it implies), this was beside the point”
(Eley, 2001, p. 827).
Hurt Locker, The (2008)
Synopsis
The Hurt Locker is an American war film written by Mark Boal; directed by
Kathryn Bigelow; and starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty,
Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce. The film fol-
lows the exploits of an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team charged with
finding and neutralizing IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that is, bombs,
during the Iraq War.
Background
In December 2004, after navigating a sea of Department of Defense (DOD) red
tape, freelance journalist Mark Boal spent two weeks embedded with the 788th Ord-
nance Com pany, a U.S. Army EOD disposal unit based at Camp Victory in
Baghdad, Iraq. During that brief period Boal accompanied Staff Sergeant Jeffrey S.
Sarver and his two- man team to watch them do the incredibly dangerous job of