Baghdad provides the Iraq setting for The Hurt Locker.
The film follows a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team during the Iraq War. Its episodes take place amid bomb threats, checkpoints, civilian crowds, and patrols in and around Baghdad, presenting the work as a tense psychological drama rather than a conventional battlefield chronicle.
Kathryn Bigelow directed the 2008 film from a screenplay by journalist Mark Boal, who had spent time embedded with an American bomb-disposal unit in Iraq. Jeremy Renner plays Staff Sergeant William James, the team’s newly assigned bomb technician.
Baghdad is sometimes mixed up with other major Iraq War locations, including Basra and Mosul. The film was shot largely in Jordan, not Iraq, with Amman standing in for parts of Baghdad. The production’s desert locations helped create its distinctive visual atmosphere.