“Given that The Hurt Locker is set in Iraq and [director] Kathryn Bigelow has been a bit off the radar of late, journos and industryites mostly had a ‘show me’ attitude about it,” senior Variety critic Todd McCarthy wrote yesterday. “For the majority, Bigelow delivered, with a strong charge of visceral, stops-out action cinema.

Hurt Locker star Jeremy Renner

“I’m apparently not the only one to have noticed this, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that the film is a very cleverly disguised real-world remake of Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron‘s Aliens. (McCarthy may have been referring to my 9.9 review, but has anyone else made this observation?)
“The Hurt Locker is about a bomb-defusing squad of U.S. soldiers; as in Aliens, death can strike you from anywhere, anytime, and Jeremy Renner‘s risk junkie is Sigourney Weaver‘s Ripley, right down to the outer space outfit he sometimes has to wear.”

Aliens‘ Sigourney Weaver at controls of powerloader