We are going to have to talk a bit about aesthetics and their relationship to fiction and reality here, and I will try to make that as painless as possible. Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (opens tomorrow, if you live in a major city, looks like) is a very suspenseful, intentionally frightening (thriller-style) look at a wildman who defuses bombs during the early-middle stages of the Iraq war. It is about, Bigelow said the other night at MoMA, an "inexorable tide of potential violence." (She meant, I think, reality; real violence.) It is also gorgeous, and successfully shot in a manner that is intentionally documentary-like yet artful and immersive (manipulatively so!) at every step.

Using four cameras (shooting Super 16), Bigelow surrounds the actors, looking over shoulders, following behind, always tracking, always conveying actual data about where people are located at all times-and she moved these cameras between almost every take. (Editing must have been hell.) The super-gorgeous slo-mo bits-which are being used, uncomfortably, to sell the film as something of a blow-'em-up movie- were shot, though, on digital, with an insanely high frame-per-second rate.

Let's look again at the still image above! This vocabulary here is not discernibly different than that used by Michael Bay, though she has much greater skill at composition and at, you know, allowing imagery to convey actual meaning. (Of which Bay has little to none.) Although we import much of that meaning, because we are all individually like 1. ACK BOMB! and also 2. ACK, BAGHDAD!

Because the vast majority of the film is about people doing things that are dangerous-being close to IEDs-, Bigelow is insanely attentive to what she calls "threat ratio." What is most impressive in the movie is her attention to space-you always know exactly how near or far the actors are to things that go boom.

But here is a still from Transformers 2.

So you see. Yes, there are real differences there! And also real similarities.

And maybe you can see how all sorts of problems arise. A problem: her cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, also did Paul Greengrass' evil, horrible, vapid United 93. He is very good at his job! He is so good that that movie was death porn, and an unforgivable misuse of "real life events" merged with fiction and speculation. There was nothing about that movie that explained why it needed to be made. It couldn't possibly have paid tribute to the people killed on the real United 93, because we do not know what they did or did not do. It was made up!

The Hurt Locker is also a work of fiction, but its similarities to United 93 arise because it was written by Mark Boal (also was a producer), because for some reason he felt he needed a further expression of the reporting he did after embedding in Iraq for a couple of weeks. (He also wrote In the Valley of Elah, which was directed by Paul Haggis, also an Iraq war film.) He is very clear that the characters and the plot of Hurt Locker were made by "compressing," he said, from his experiences. So these are not real people or situations. But there is something of a tug of war between authenticity and fiction.

For instance, Bigelow said that she wanted to protect the "reportorial nature" of the script. But it is fiction. The script is not reportorial. Yet it carries that patina. It is based on his journalism, Bigelow said; and also, she said, the content is inherently dramatic.

So in these ways the film has both plenty to do with Transformers and also with reality TV such as "The Hills." It is supposed to look and feel "real." (It effectively does so!) It has the imprimatur of a writer who was "embedded" and therefore knows things you don't know because you weren't there, man.

Also, the script is very good!

All this undermines what is largely a great movie. Or? Except not, if you don't think about it. Which is easy, because it's so great to watch. So its flaws are all its strengths. It is good precisely because it is as exciting as Die Hard. Which was also a good movie! It just existed in an apolitical context. (Okay: MOSTLY. Not really, I guess, in the Wars on Terrors!)

What's more, Hurt Locker has so many impressive/commendable facets; it was shot in Jordan, which is in itself sort of miraculous, as well as admirable. It has spacey interregnums in the plot, which are successful and similar to some of the ideas that Jarhead tried and failed miserably to express. (I am thinking about the horse in the exploded burning oil fields.) Its lead actor, Jeremy Renner is, in addition to be unbearably sexy (your mileage may vary!), just fantastic. You are warned that the movie suffers from a possibly awkward final 60 seconds, though otherwise it has a terrific ending. Since there are going to be ten movies up for Academy Award this year, it should most likely squeeze on in.