This was one of the most critically-acclaimed films of the year - as well as my No. 3 film of the year. Now you can finally see what everyone is talking about.

At the center of it all is one of the year's best performances. The actor's name is Jeremy Renner, who is sure to win an Oscar nomination for his role as William James, a volatile mix of daredevil, technician and eternal optimist.

The movie starts with a scene of his predecessor being killed along the streets of Iraq, the victim of the kind of roadside bomb that James spends his time defusing. He walks into the scene that everyone else runs from and sets about snipping the wires on the bomb that could level a full city block.

The genuine tension in "The Hurt Locker," is of a gut-wrenching variety that James' immediate colleagues seem to understand perfectly well.

There's JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who is by-the-book, anxious and alarmed, and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), the man who is scared witless. He's doing everything he can merely to come back from the Middle East on his feet and not in a body bag.

These are the sort of soldiers we're more familiar with in war films - the chiseled career soldier and the terrified newbie. But James is something of a wild card. Whereas the old bomb technician was careful and precise, James cheerfully suits up and storms right in to his first bomb scare.

At first glance, it seems that this is a man at peace with his work. But really, as this team goes on call after call, there's something more to it than that. He relishes in these tours, and it's enough to freak Sanborn out.

Golden Globe-nominated director Kathryn Bigelow ("Strange Days," "Point Break") has stripped down her film of all the non-essential elements, giving us a view so sparse and suspenseful that we can't help but be taken in by the mindset of these warriors.

Whereas other war films might pause for scenes of revelry or bunk humor, there's very little of that here - just the relentless rhythm of deadly danger and welcome relief. Over and over, day after day, this is the procession. The call comes in, Sanborn and Eldridge secure the perimeter, James crawls under a car laced with bombs, and with the cutting of the final chord, they go back home to live another day.

It's a brutal cycle that doesn't just rewire their psyche. It rewires ours, as well. While we gasp and hold our breath during the first bomb scare, we start to accept that this is the way things are in a country where a sniper's bullet could - at any second of any day - zip through air and through your skull.

"The Hurt Locker" captures this need for calm under pressure and helps us to see as we have never before the places of the brain that need to be shut down and quarantined in order to maintain that state of serenity.

And in this major way, "The Hurt Locker" is a revelation. It peels back the moviemaking cliches and exposes the raw truth of war: That to keep your body alive, you must rewire your brain. And once that wiring is rerouted, you are never the same person again.

E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com