When you’re dealing with a genre that’s already had plenty said about it, what can you possibly do to kindle some sense of freshness, of difference? In the case of The Hurt Locker, writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have chosen to create a war story focused on a group of men who’ve been bit part characters in many other films, but never to my knowledge been the core of attention: bomb disposal technicians.

The film lays its cards out in a first scene of incredible tension. A bomb disposal robot rolls up to an explosive device covered in sheets. With humour born of bravado, its operators vie for control of the machine, wanting to use its camera to peek through a hole in the sheets, and have problems doing so. “Pretend it’s your dick,” says one of them, cementing the machismo of these men firmly in the mind of the audience. Minutes later, one of them is dead.

But this is the army, and men are replaceable, and the new team leader has a more gung-ho outlook than his predecessor. It’s to the script’s credit that the effect of different bomb technicians’ personalities on their approach to work is so clear. The heartstopping business of bomb disposal makes huge demands on the operatives, who have different approaches to dealing with the insane risks they face.

The critical business is all about reducing risk by turning unknown factors into known and controllable variables. But in Iraq’s streets, pretty much everything is an unknown. Every face at a window is potentially an enemy, and that holds double for those seemingly being friendly. At any given moment, a goat may wander into the field of operation and block a crucial line of sight, a mobile phone could signal a remote detonation — or someone speaking to their sister. The camerawork captures this chaos beautifully: how are burger-fed representatives of Uncle Sam meant to cope with the reality of doing their job in a country where they’re not welcome?

This is filmmaking of a high order. Bigelow doesn’t impose a signature on the material, instead letting the characters and situations speak for themselves in all their dark adrenalised horror. Again, and again, the team dispose of bombs — but there’s no sense of repetition or redundancy here, every new encounter revealing another facet of the personalities of the three core characters. We see them off duty and on, the guys getting drunk and hitting each other in the gut as hard as they can — even their bonding moments are characterised by violence and danger.

An intermittent countdown tells us how long the unit have to stay in Iraq before returning to America. The camera follows them, revealing the empty desolation at the heart of the team leader’s life as he wanders supermarket aisles with a trolley in search of the breakfast cereal that his wife has asked him to find. How can she possibly understand what he’s been through? And how can he adjust to a life of domesticity after the atrocities he’s witnessed?

There’ve been a few films devoted to the Iraq experience, and The Hurt Locker has documentary realism in its favour: even if some of the scenes and details have no factual basis, the clear research gone into the rest of it carries through to create a compelling worldview. For a bigger picture of the conflict and America’s role in it, Three Kings continues to have plenty to recommend it. For a ground level depiction of what life and death are like for soldiers who’ve chosen to specialise in bomb disposal, and what that says about the American military industrial complex that continues to find men to play such a role, The Hurt Locker is a powerful portrayal of life during wartime.