Movie Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty (2013)
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Dan Clarke, Joel Edgerton
Director: Katherine Bigelow

Kitch's Rating: 9.8/10

Mild spoilers ahead

In a word: spellbinding.

The director-writer team of Katherine Bigelow and Mark Boal scored big with 2009's The Hurt Locker and have followed up that brilliant film with this, the dramatisation of the ten-year hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The Al Qaeda henchman, responsible for masterminding the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, had proven to be a tough catch, escaping out from under the noses of American forces during the Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001, the world's most wanted terrorist had gone to ground, despite the exhaustive efforts of American intelligence to smoke him out.

Eventually, they did, culminating in a May 2011 raid into Abbotabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden was cornered and killed by US Navy SEALs. The film, pulsating, tense, dramatic and full of interesting moral questions regarding torture - or, as it is more properly known, enhanced interrogation techniques - begins with some confronting and disturbing scenes of those enhanced interrogation techniques in action. The first life and colour you see features Australian actor Jason Clarke, as a CIA interrogator, doing some pretty horrible things to an unnamed terrorist believed to somehow be involved in moving money around for Al Qaeda assets and operations.

These scenes, during which no one in the cinema appears particularly comfortable (and nor should they be) are slightly preceded by a black, empty screen whilst a compilation of radio transmission and mobile phone calls from the morning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, and thus begins the theme of revenge that is central in the next two and a half hours of film. As the years slide by, and the hunt for Bin Laden, spearheaded by a CIA analyst named Maya, gains momentum. Some of it is luck but a lot of it is solid intelligence work, championed by the almost obsessive Maya, who, as she tells CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) in one memorable scene, hasn't worked on anything else in her Agency career since being recruited out of high school. Just Bin Laden.

There are no sides taken in this film. Impartiality is king, and there are scenes that'll make you smile, scenes that uncomfortable, and others that are just plain horrible. Bigelow and Boal tell the story and it's left up to the viewer to decide, for themselves, the merits of what is shown on the screen. This is one of the film's great strengths, and part of why, aside from the way the narrative progresses, that Zero Dark Thirty is being hailed by critics everywhere. Nor is there any overt American flag waving - the sort that a director like Jerry Bruckheimer likes to employ - and it only adds to the almost documentary feel of the movie.

Right from the get-go, from those opening scenes - you don't have to wait long to see what most of the controversy surrounding this film is all about, and it's done fairly quickly, too - to a team of CIA analysts piecing together the tangled trail to Bin Laden that begins with the identification of a courier who may or may not be working for the man Maya and her colleagues know simply as "UBL". There are moments where the whole world seems to be against Maya, and she's not at all afraid to take risky - to the furtherment of her career, at least - stands for what she believes in. When no one else holds much faith in the courier being their link to Bin Laden

Then comes the final, climactic raid by members of the US Navy's SEAL Team Six, the "Canaries" as they are called by some White House staffer - Australians Joel Edgerton and Callan Mulvey - into the high-walled Abbotabad, Pakistan complex where Bin Laden had been hiding for many years. Even though you know great chunks of what's happening or about to happen in this film, it's still gripping stuff.

The final raid is as tense as anything prior to it, and filmed, mostly, in the illuminate green that the SEAL raiders would have seen events through, thanks to their use of Night Vision Goggles in the dark house. It only made the raid seem more realistic. The slick professionals barely had a chance to register what they'd done, who they'd killed, before they were yanked out of Pakistan.

Fittingly, the final scene - and the official confirmation - is left to Chastain's character (for which she may well win Best Actress at the Oscars), and when she unzips the body bag to stare into the dead face of the man she's hunted for so many years, the look on her own face is one of immense relief. But where does someone who has spent so many years obsessively looking for one man go from here? It's a good question, and one that could be applied to the United States of America, too.