One of my favourite modern war films is The Hurt Locker starring Jeremy Renner as a rowdy US Army EOD Sergeant who is deployed to a unit who have lost there team leader.

The film at the time came in for a lot of criticism from American soldiers because they felt the film was not a realistic portrayal of a bomb disposal team in Iraq. That said, I still enjoy it as a suspenseful story.

When Meng Models recently released their 1/35 US Army EOD figure set I knew I would be buying it as I wanted to remake a memorable scene from the film as a vignette.

Meng’s EOD set comes with two figures dressed in bomb disposal kit and it comes remotely controlled robots and a couple of laptops.

I wanted to recreate the scene in the film when the lead character, Sgt. James finds himself surrounded by live bombs, it is the same scene used for the movie poster:

It was easy to replicate the pose of Sgt.James by matching parts from the two figures and his blast suit was an easy paint scheme of black and green.

A simple conversion gave me a decent representation of Sgt.James and then it was a matter of making a simple vignette. For this I took a MDF base, added some AK Interactive sand texture and I made burrows in the ground work for the bombs.

The bombs were old spares painted in a dull aluminium and red twine was cut to length to replicate the fuse wires.

With the figure and bombs set into the base, I then printed off the film’s logo and also set it into the ground work. To blend it altogether I misted on a lightened shade of Tamiya Buff to match the colour of the sand in the film.

The final results were quite realistic!

Hope you enjoyed this simple vignette, take care and I’ll see you next time.

Darren