# The Hurt Locker **URL:** **By** Eric Gomez, Emma Ashford, Landry Ayres, Natalie Dowzicky **Published:** September 15, 2021 --- Emma Ashford \& Eric Gomez return to the podcast to discuss Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 award-winning American war thriller film, The Hurt Locker. ## Summary: _The Hurt Locker_ was the first narrative feature to make full, unnerving dramatic sense of the war in Iraq, and it does so without polemics or speeches or phony melodrama. In fact, the director, Kathryn Bigelow, has been praised for making a war movie that is apolitical in nature. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat.