Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker began its limited release this weekend. If it's not already at a theater near you (i.e. if you don't live in Los Angeles or New York), it's hopefully on its way. The movie follows a bomb disposal squad in Iraq tasked with finding and disarming IEDs. Along with HBO's superlative Generation Kill, it's not really about the events of the war so much as the effect of the war on the men deployed there. Hurt Locker is to war movies what The French Connection was to cop dramas.

And guess what game gets some prominent screen time. The original Gears of War (the movie was shot in 2008 before the release of Gears 2). One of the three lead characters is playing the game when either a Corpsman or a psychiatrist comes up to conduct an impromptu therapy session in the wake of a traumatic event. There are several seconds of game footage and you can clearly see the Xbox 360 and controller.

You might consider this just a contemporary take on how today's soldiers spent their idle time, sort of like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, playing volleyball and glistening in the sun. But instead, Bigelow is a shrewd enough filmmaker that she's intentionally making a point that this is part of how soldiers in combat deal with stress: violence as recreation. The movie opens with the observation that "war is a drug". So it's no coincidence that the scene is about playing Gears of War as a way to deal with a traumatic event. Rather than turning to the man trained to help him, he has his nose in a videogame.

To Bigelow's credit, it's not played like a value judgment so much as an observation. Like so much of Hurt Locker, it's subtle and effective.