Critics have been slobbering over The Hurt Locker for some time; I finally checked it out on DVD last weekend. The episodic structure reminded me of The Big Red One, and both movies end by gesturing poignantly back to the beginning.
Bigelow and Boal state their thesis - that "war is a drug" - and use a cool documentary style to back it up. The characters are well drawn and consistent, with one exception I'll get to in a moment. The Iraqis are not one-dimensional victims and villains, though they are portrayed as strange and often dangerous, from the Americans' point of view. Action sequences are clearly and believably staged. Occasional use of slo-mo subverts the documentary feel, but overall the tone doesn't suffer much.
I have a problem with the scene in which one soldier discusses the possibility of killing another soldier. (The death could be made to look like an accident.) This seemed crazily out of character for the would-be assassin. Boal was a reporter embedded with a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq. My hunch is that one of the soldiers he was covering initiated a similar discussion, and Boal couldn't resist putting it into the movie.
The Hurt Locker isn't quite up to the level of Generation Kill, but that mini-series had seven hours to tell its story. Overall, I'd rate The Hurt Locker a very good movie.
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