Hurt Locker/ Sand Storm

The Hurt Locker is a film that tells the story of an Army bomb squad fighting to stay alive in Iraq. The Sand Storm is a play by Sean Huze in which a series of monologues about the Iraq war are performed by a group of Marines. Both of these follow a series of characters through the war and shows it affects them not only as a soldier in the war but as a civilian back home. To compare and contrast these I would look at the base similarities and differences first, and then move on to a more analytical view point, focusing mainly on the characters themselves.
The base similarities of these would be: they are both about the Iraq war, they both follow a specific group of characters and they have a character that is really at the heart of the stories, a character that ties everything together. In The Hurt Locker that character is Specialist Owen Eldridge, a young member of the bomb squad, he doesn’t quite know where his path is leading him yet which makes him very impressionable to the ideas of the men around him. Eldridge has this need to belong and you get the sense that the harder he tries the more he ostracizes himself, and the more he loses himself to the pressure of the world of war. In contrast, that central character in The Sand Storm is the well respected Marine Sergeant Casavecchia. Casavecchia is seen as the wise character who knows everything that is going on in the story. He knows everything about everyone but he doesn’t let that interfere with who he is. With Eldridge you get the sense that he is a little boy pretending to be an adult. But with Casavecchia he is very much a role model, you get the sense he’s mother, father, brother, best friend. He’s anything people need him to be, but he still has a very distinct identity.
In The Hurt Locker one of the characters that affect Eldridge the most is the character of Sergeant First Class William James. James is a daredevil type, someone who is addicted to the adrenaline that is produced in high risk situations. He has a wife and a baby back home but he’s become so addicted to war that he can’t appreciate the simplicity of that life any more. At first Eldridge is almost in aw of this character, a boy looking up to an idol, but as things turn bad later in the film he finally realizes that his reverence is misguided, all James is full of is stupidity. In The Sand Storm Lance Corporal Casey Dodd was a character that shared this kind of god complex of war. He was on a high of power and death when reality finally set in for him, he had killed a child and that never went away. Casavecchia is almost the prompt for this story, you get the sense he is coaching Dodd through the monologue, always in charge.
The endings for these are as telling as the actual “meat” of the stories. For The Sand Storm you come to understand why all of these men have been so affected by Marine/Sgt. Casavecchia, why he seemed to always be in charge of the situation. You understand the finer points of the monologues, the ambiguity that some of them carried and why Casavecchia was the one who tied them all together. In The Hurt Locker you get the sense that everything has come full circle, but nothings really changed at all. What I mean by that is that the main characters finally realize themselves, and come to terms with what their lives are really like. They’ve known who they are all along and what they have wanted but in their situation it was hard to distinguish between true feelings and those induced by their surroundings. Eldridge finally gives up on trying to be what everyone expects due to injury and by doing so really comes into his own. The characters are what make these two stories so unique, but it is also what makes them similar. Even with the utter contrasts between the two characters of Eldridge and Casavecchia there is a commonality between them because they have been through similar situations. I think that holds true for the stories themselves as well, with all the differences that are seen between the set up and characters and plots in general they are still very similar because they are sharing the same setting.