When Stanley Kubrick undertook his Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket, the legendary director reportedly wanted to make a movie about “war as a phenomenon,” rather than a conventional anti-war film like his classic Paths of Glory. Kubrick was interested in the experience of war and what it offers to those who fight: Excitement as well as horror; absurdity as well as pathos; and—for some—a clear-eyed, stripped-down trip to the existential edge. Only a few modern films have managed to pull off this rather tricky balancing act: Full Metal Jacket and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now come most immediately to mind. Not surprisingly, both were set against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam.

Now we’re in a war with a great many similarities to Vietnam: Undertaken for dubious reasons and maintained by its own self-feeding momentum with no clear exit strategy (which was apparently part of the plan). And Hollywood, over the past few years, has begun its attempt to grapple with the reality and meaning of the United States’ involvement in Iraq with a series of well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful films dealing (sometimes indirectly) with the war.

The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, is the first Iraq film to confront this war in the way that Coppola and  Kubrick, especially, addressed Vietnam. It’s also the first great Iraq war movie, interested in people and action (in both the dramatic and pyrotechnic sense) rather than grand statements and politics.

“War is a drug,” says the film’s epigraph, and that statement represents the double-edged notion The Hurt Locker explores: That war, like drugs, can—for a certain kind of person—offer exhilaration and enlightenment, even while taking an enormous psychological and spiritual toll.