The Hurt Locker Essay Example

The Hurt Locker is a film that tells the story of an Army bomb squad fighting to stay alive in Iraq. The Sand Storm is a play by Sean Huze in which a series of monologues about the Iraq war are performed by a group of Marines. Both of these follow a series of characters through the war and shows it affects them not only as a soldier in the war but as a civilian back home. To compare and contrast these I would look at the base similarities and differences first, and then move on to a more analytical view point, focusing mainly on the characters themselves.
The base similarities of these would be: they are both about the Iraq war, they both follow a specific group of characters and they have a character that is really at the heart of the stories, a character that ties everything together. In The Hurt Locker that character is Specialist Owen Eldridge, a young member of the bomb squad, he doesn’t quite know where his path is leading him yet which makes him very impressionable to the ideas of the men around him. Eldridge has this need to belong and you get the sense that the harder he tries the more he ostracizes himself, and the more he loses himself to the pressure of the world of war. In contrast, that central character in The Sand Storm is the well respected Marine Sergeant Casavecchia. Casavecchia is seen as the wise character who knows everything that is going on in the story. He knows everything about everyone but he doesn’t let that interfere with who he is. With Eldridge you get the sense that he is a little boy pretending to be an adult. But with Casavecchia he is very much a role model, you get the sense he’s mother, father, brother, best friend. He’s anything people need him to be, but he still has a very distinct identity.
In The Hurt Locker one of the characters that affect Eldridge the most is the character of Sergeant First Class William James. James is a daredevil type, someone who is addicted to the adrenaline that is produced in high risk