Alternative Scriptwriting, 5th Edition

20

Exceptional, but Opaque Characters in Flattened Scripts

In the first fifteen minutes of The Hurt Locker (Katherine Bigelow, 2008), three members of a bomb squad serving in Iraq attempt to disarm a bomb. Their dialogue is tense and clipped; their fear covered by crude sexual humor. When they fail to destroy the bomb by robot, one of the soldiers, Thompson, must approach it in a bomb suit. The stage directions read, “Constrained by the eighty-pound suit, sweat in his eyes, Thompson LUMBERS down the road. . .”¹ We imagine the three characters feel much like we might in this situation—frightened, on the edge of losing control, counting the seconds before it is over. None of them stand out as distinct, unusual, or particularly driven. We wonder ...