The Hurt Locker offers a sandblasted portrait of an overworked and under-fire U.S. Army Bomb Disposal unit in Iraq. Like her hypoxic submarine thriller K-19, Bigelow’s latest film focuses more on the mercurial dynamics of the beleaguered male group than any larger geopolitics. A decidedly unconventional war film for an infamously unconventional conflict, The Hurt Locker avoids battle scenes to instead follow the taut tripwire strung across seven agonizingly suspenseful sequences of the unit at work defusing explosives devices. A riveting character study centered around the team’s newest member, a frighteningly carefree adrenaline junkie, The Hurt Locker is a fascinating return to Bigelow’s frequent theme of moral and ethical identities reinvented by extreme danger.