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Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a staggering achievement, a movie that is not just exceptionally well-crafted - somehow it finds a way to stand apart from other war movies of late. Just as Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line looked and sounded different than pretty much every WWII movie, The Hurt Locker, while traversing similar narrative territory to other films about modern warfare, is a completely self-contained entity, a picture that is achingly familiar, yet blisteringly new.

After losing a bomb technician to an explosion, an Iraq-based US force brings in Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who is both one of the armed forces' most trusted bomb diffusers and a guy who does things his own way (read: He's reckless and devil-may-care about his actions). Along with Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), James gets called to assignments big and small, and his team's aim is not only to get rid of any sitting bombs, but to survive James' slippery tactics.

Using this straight-forward plot as a springboard to tell her film in a unique, chapter-break fashion, Bigelow doesn't just serve her subject material well here - she brings it to life. Far more Full Metal Jacket than Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker adheres to no singular storytelling syntax in getting its point across. There are shoot-outs, to be sure, but some of the film's most notable moments come when viewers have no idea exactly what's happening, exactly what kind of mortal peril these characters continue to find themselves in.

And while all the actors here do more than pull their weight, The Hurt Locker is a breakout success because of Bigelow. Told with the cinematic bravura and confidence of a well-seasoned veteran, The Hurt Locker is war movie for the ages, a tale of nail-biting suspense and the frustrating allure of battle that is as profound as it is rivetingly exciting.

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