I'm not sure which guy you are referring to. Presumably the crazy, reckless bomb disposal guy.
no, that's not who I was referring to. but since you bring it up the point of the movie, again, is that however many bombs he defuses, scrapes he pulls out of, etc. dude is hollow inside. he's not having fun; it's compulsion & dude is clearly damaged goods. very obviously he's completely unable to connect with his son & "hot, adoring girlfriend". again, if you wanna go on about how Americans are the only full characters, alright, but don't pretend he's set up as a square-jawed, flawless hero.
as far as antiheroes who buck the system, welcome to cinema. presumably if his name was Tariq and he was a cagy insurgent setting up IEDs instead of dismantling them then you'd be fine with the antihero cliches.
As you know very well, none of these "many stories that could be told about Iraqis, their feelings & their experiences" will be made for an American audience
yep. I'm not sure why you or anyone else would find that surprising, though. or, they might get made, but only for the very small American audience likely to search them out at film festivals or art house theaters or whatever. which, ironically (or perhaps not), was/is the same exact audience for the Hurt Locker, the antithesis of a blockbuster.
the audience that wanted, financed and carried out the war that created these 'experiences' in the first place.
& that's just bullshit. even aside from the fact that the Hurt Locker's most likely audience, aside from veterans, was people likely to have been against the war (& not that there's not some overlap between them & vets).
I thought even stodgy Marxists these days were past lumping all Americans into a vat of hyperexaggerated cliches, but maybe not.