NY Times Says Hurt Locker Should “Win it” for Sound

The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan talks Oscar’s sound category. She leads with the film she considers the frontrunner for this honor:

“The Hurt Locker” is a bomb movie that mutes its booms. It derives suspense by withholding the expected “boomala, boomala,” as an Iraqi kid puts it in the film while taunting an American bomb-squad soldier about the “cool” soundtrack of Hollywood war.

“The Hurt Locker” is not cool. It’s hot and dry, a heaving desert parable with a mounting sandstorm howl at the center. The internal explosions matter more than the fireworks. Explaining the dynamics of roadside bombs in Iraq, Paul N. J. Ottosson, the film’s supervising sound editor, told Variety, “You die not from shrapnel but the expanding air that blows up your lungs.” The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself. Men can hardly summon the spit or breath to speak. Much of the dialogue — which was almost all recorded on location in Jordan (and not looped in a studio) — is delivered in headsets, as soldiers hiss into one another’s helmets across desert expanses. To listen is to enter machinery, rib cages, ear canals and troubled lungs.

Along with “Avatar,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Star Trek” and “Up,” “The Hurt Locker” is nominated for a sound-editing Academy Award. For its cerebral, abstract and still deeply romantic sound tableau — a kind of sonic Cy Twombly painting — “The Hurt Locker” should win it. Ottosson’s alignment of death and silence, instead of death and booms, partakes of an aesthetic based on the idea that you’re deaf when you die. On “The Sopranos,” a series known for its exquisite deployment of silence, Bobby Baccalieri says of dying, “You probably don’t hear it when it happens.”

Giving The Hurt Locker a run for its money, the blockbuster, Avatar:

“Avatar” alone gives “The Hurt Locker” a run for its money. Layered heavily with manufactured sounds, it is brazenly cartoonish. The sound editors Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle may be Paul Gauguin to Ottosson’s Twombly. What stands out is the whoosh of muscular — not fluttery — reptile wings as they flap and glide. This has to be the sound of flying in dreams. The dragonlike creatures vie for sonic dominance with the machinery in the film and particularly with the man-machine tanks that have their own distinctive sounds, especially in the fantasyland of Pandora, where a clash of resounding arms takes place in an atmosphere of no oxygen. For chopper sounds, the editors combined the hacking and churning of various craft. Elsewhere they aimed to make Pandora sound “intoxicating” (as Boyes told Variety) by remixing recordings made in the Amazon.

She ends it this way:

It’s intriguing that both “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” have built otherworldly environments in which humans are intoxicated — in part by being deprived of oxygen. You can hear this danger much better than you can see it, and it falls to sound editors to exploit its dimensions. What a great challenge in moviemaking: the various sounds of breath — gasping, sighing, speaking, expiring — may be film’s first and most consequential sound effect. Here’s to films that revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness. And at the Academy Awards, may the most inspiring use of sound — did I mention “The Hurt Locker”? — win.

It will come as no surprise that we here at Awards Daily agree with this — sound in The Hurt Locker is almost a character in and of itself. As I remember the film back, I hear it as much as I see it. I hear the sounds of the blood and guts in the body bomb dead kid, I hear Jeremy Renner’s footsteps on the sand, I hear the noise of the wheels on the gravel and of course, who can forget the sound of the steel lock when it is freed at last from the poor suicide bomber. With one release it finally tugs loose. But it is just one and there are way too many. And then … boom.