The Hurt Locker really is a brilliant film about the strain, fear and sheer boredom of war, but also, like many anti-war films, it also provides a lot of the old-fashioned excitement that is generally associated with action films.
The relentless attention to the sheer awfulness of war, which is the film's great strength, is also something of a shortcoming.
Lest facetiousness seem to prevail, one soon becomes aware, as in "Troilus and Cressida," of a strong authorial take on the sheer absurdity of war.
But it is almost a rule in combat zones that situations can change from boredom to hyper intense in a heartbeat, and suddenly Pedersen and his men are thrust into the sheer fog of war, chaos of combat, where life and death choices have to be made under the worst conditions imaginable.
What Churchill quite failed to grasp was the importance of sheer mass in modern war, as opposed to "The British Way in Warfare".
Commercial counts are a better guide to the advertising war than sheer dollars.
What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests.
Moreover, Guelzo reveals the sheer confusion of Civil War battles; commanders desperately lacked information about the locations and intentions of their enemies, even sometimes of their own divisions.
To delay withdrawal in the hope that an Iraqi government under a democratic constitution will emerge and end the civil war is sheer foolishness.
It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me — a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II.
But now, at the end of their home tour, the Bravos are on the march, "and how fine it would be if they could outwalk the war by sheer force of will".
