Soundtrack Review: The Hurt Locker (2008)

Posted by Timothy E. RAW

January 26, 2010

Welcome back! Have you subscribed to my RSS feed yet? Make sure you don't miss anything by getting all Soundtrack Geek posts by Email. Also check out Soundtrack Fans, a new social network for soundtrack fans. Thanks for visiting!

HurtLocker Soundtrack Review: The Hurt Locker (2008) Movie Soundtrack Review: This is a review of the motion picture score The Hurt Locker by Marco Beltrami & Buck Sanders.

“The experience of watching The Hurt Locker can’t be fully felt on the score album alone.”

I first saw the one-of-a-kind war movie, The Hurt Locker back in February of last year and since then it has seemed like an eternity waiting for the release of the film’s score by Marco Beltrami & Buck Sanders, a soundtrack I’d been anticipating as soon as the credits rolled eleven months prior. The duo gave me the surprise of 2009 with their unsung effort for the otherwise dreadful, Max Payne. What I admired so much about their second collaboration in conjunction with the film, was that it did so much more than simply evoke an emotional response from the viewer. It got us inside the heads of a three-man bomb disposal unit, trying to survive the Iraq conflict in 2004. Life in a bomb disposal unit in the Middle East is probably not like anything that you or I could possibly begin to conceive of, but all the elements of The Hurt Locker; direction, camerawork, acting, editing sound design and score are wholly dependent upon each other in believably taking us there and placing us in the thick of the action, to jaw-dropping effect.

Track Listing

1 The Hurt Locker (*****)
2 Goodnight Bastard (****)
3 The Long Walk (*****)
4 Hostile (****)
5 B Company
6 Man in the Green Bomb Suit (***)
7 There Will Be Bombs (***)
8 Body Bomb (***)
9 Bleeding Deacon (***)
10 Oil Tanker Aftermath (****)
11 A Guest in My House (****)
12 The Way I Am (*****)

Hostility From All Angles

The opening note of the title track plunges the listener into an environment of hostility from all angles. Every which way you turn your ears is threatening and dangerous. Emerging from this queasy froth of strings is the wailing heartbeat of increasing tension.

The atmospherics of “Goodnight Bastard” give off the harsh shimmer of heat and unforgiving desert surroundings, whilst also lending them the feel of an alien landscape. As it builds beyond topographic impressions, it begins to sound more and more like music you’d associate with “the man with no name” arriving in a ghost town western. This is appropriate since the film builds a picture of the protagonist Staff Sgt. James as being quite the gung-ho cowboy on the job, addicted to the rush of danger in dismantling bombs. Not in any way parodic or lazy caricature, a guitar line and returning queasy strings are mournfully sombre, the first indication to the methodical and isolated intensity of James’ psyche. The final minute of this cue is an illustration of director Kathryn Bigelow’s desire to “blur the line between sound effects and score” and Beltrami and Sanders’ decision “to use a small ensemble and some of the film’s production sounds fused together” to create this effect. This alloy of two separate soundtracks had the chaotic effect of discombobulating and confusing me as much as the soldiers when all hell breaks loose while watching the film, making the fog of war just as aural as it is visual.

“The Long Walk” is music set to one of the film’s signature sequences. Sgt. James, walking out in the open towards a bomb with possible hostiles all around him in 125 degree heat, wearing a 100 pound bomb suit, his peripheral vision cut off and reduced only to what’s directly in front of him, all sounds other than his own breathing heard as though he were underwater. The listener immediately gets a sense of the mortal danger faced every day by those in the bomb unit, working a daily grind that most of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. Layers of distorted instrumentation acting like the padding of the bomb suit on the listener’s ears, the sound effects of what sounds like muffled gunfire ever-present in the background. Visually and sonically, this indelible moment of the film is inherently tense, iconic, and cinematic, and as James draws closer to the I.E.D. (improvised explosive device) he’s attempting to dismantle, the score surges in a knife-edge rush of tension, sounding like something being tracked along the serrated edge of a blade. One of those “don’t cut the red wire” trailer moments of old.

In light of all the Iraq movies that have tanked at the box office, The Hurt Locker is to be commended for being low on speechifying and choosing to turn its attention on the machismo tension of three guys doing a really interesting job under unbelievable pressure and insurmountable odds. It never once seems to use any of this as a political platform and the score is approached the same way, “Hostile” being a good example of this. Iraqi instrumentation is always present but never rammed down the listener’s throat the way Zimmer or one of his cronies would’ve probably scored it. The cue has the sound of the country, but ethnic instruments are directly competing against — and trying to intrude upon — the steady, determined and focused electronic (heart)beat of Sgt. James trying to block all that out and focus on his job of defusing an I.E.D. It was so refreshing to hear an ethnically orientated cue do something with its unique sounds other than routinely and lazily tell us what country we’re in.

The Enemy Within

From this point on there, there is a marked shift in the following three or four cues, from an exterior, hostile landscape into an interior, psychological space. “B. Company” seems to suggest something of the enemy within, as the increasing life-or-death stakes of their job get under the skin of the men and begin to psychologically unravel them. “Man In the Green Bomb Suit” takes on a more singular point of view, bristling with uncertainty and second-guessing doubt; each echoing footfall that resounds under the instruments, implying someone looking every which way, constantly reassessing the danger of their surroundings. The feeling of paranoia continues and builds to pressure-cooker intensity for “There Will Be Bombs”, all sweaty strings and shrill wind instruments anticipating the chaos that is to come.

“Body Bomb” is slow-burn drama, taking its cues from the camerawork; a grimier, grittier, handheld and painfully authentic alternative to telegraphed Hollywood action scenarios. For this scene of a suicide bomber with second thoughts, the music is not meant for movie moments built around countdown clocks or red-wire/green-wire dilemmas; it’s all sweat and shouting and men working quickly while other men watch, frozen in the shadows. The string work here is as haunting as it is terse and unnerving.

“Bleeding Deacon” has the queasy quality of earlier cues, but reminiscent of the uneasy menace and creeping dread of the scores to recent David Lynch films; the strings eulogising spilled blood n’ guts and body parts blown all over the battlefield.

I talked about being discombobulated earlier and how the score, by mixing both music and sound effects helps the film to this end. That blending is nowhere more evident than on “Oil Tanker Aftermath”, an abstract expression of — and a window into — the traumatic state of mind of someone in the midst of the cacophony of war. Here the score pitches the intensity of battle in slow-motion; a suspended echo of the world around you, roaring in your head. After the first minute, the strings take precedence and proceed to give the cue more obvious form before being asphyxiated by sound effects once again, leaving the listener shell-shocked.

A Change of Pace

“A Guest In My House” is the most straight-up adrenaline junkie type cue, exploding in the mid section into more atypical action-suspense music with an electronic edge. When listening to the soundtrack away from the film, this offers a welcome change of pace, although the austere strings soon beat this into the background towards the end of the cue, ensuring that it stays relatively dark in mood and that the action isn’t played just for straight thrills. This is undercut by the abruptness of the way the strings cut off at the climax, a jolt unpleasant enough to make your skin crawl.

The album ends with “The Way I Am”, a short cue that puts us back in the head of Sgt. James, reprising the “Western motif” of earlier. Although largely unchanged, the strings this time are a lot grander and also more sympathetic, as if the cue has accumulated more weight and resonance at the end of the album as a direct result of the experiences, musically described by the preceding cues. The overall feeling is one of both the heroism and futility of war, whilst simultaneously suggesting a sense of loneliness amidst the madness.

Conclusion

A fever-dream score that works in lethally accurate accord with the sense of 360-degree immersive threat created through the bravado filmmaking. However, one is so synonymous with the other that the visceral nature of the experience of watching The Hurt Locker can’t be fully felt on the score album alone.