Zero Dark Thirty

As one of 2012's most controversial and talked about films, Zero Dark Thirty is not exactly what you'd expect, but still impressive. ZD30 is VERY well made, so much so that it feels documentary like. Just like two other big movies of 2012, Lincoln and Argo, ZD30 is telling a story that the audience already knows. Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in May 2011, and everyone is familiar with what happened. But director Kathryn Bigelow does a great job keeping the intensity high, and the audience on the edge of their seats.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, U.S. intelligence was able to pin point that bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization were behind the strike. ZD30 is the story of tracking down bin Laden and killing him. At the head of the search is Maya (Jessica Chastain) a young woman whose whole career becomes devoted to finding bin Laden. From 2003-2011 she is completely consumed by the search, at the expense of everything else in her life. The movie spans from initial intelligence in the wake of the attacks to the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.There are no spoilers to warn about because the story is out there, and happened very recently.

The first hour of the movie shows how the U.S. was able to obtain the initial leads on bin Laden, and it was largely done through the use of torture. The torture scenes are brutal. Not brutal in the way that the Saw movies depict torture, but I could feel the psychological effect it had on the men being tortured. Bigelow pulls no punches in showing water boarding, physical brutality, and psychological torture through the use of sleep and sensory deprivation. After the movie premiered, the buzz was around the use of torture in the film. Many thought that it glorified its use; the Americans use it to gain information, and the information leads to the killing of bin Laden, plain and simple. I didn't feel like the movie was taking a stand on torture either way. It felt to me like the filmmakers told the story that they had from descriptions of first hand accounts. Whether or not you agree with the use of torture to gain information, you have to accept that it was a means to an end in tracking down one of the world's most evil villains. It's hard for me not to take some sort of stand on the issue, but I felt like the people using it were doing so in a "war time" context, and I didn't find myself so appalled by their actions. But luckily I've never been faced with the choice of torturing another human being for information, or using other more humane, and possibly less effective, interrogation techniques when lives are at stake. I think that if I were faced with the issue head on, my perspective would probably change. In a perfect world, torture would never enter the conversation, but that is just not where we live.

Jessica Chastain is great as Maya, the woman who was largely responsible for finding bin Laden. She never gives up in pursuit of finding him, and her tenacity is what convinces her superiors that the search needs to continue. Chastain is great, and while I still think that I like Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook better, Chastain's performance is incredibly real and equally deserved of a nomination for Best Actress. The rest of the cast is made up of mostly unknowns or character actors (actors who you know you've seen but aren't big enough for you to remember their name; in ZD30 there's Harold Perrineau, Kyle Chandler, and Jason Clarke, all actors whom you will recognize when you see, but probably didn't recognize their names as I just listed them). I thought that the two biggest faces were James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) as one of Maya's superiors, and Christ Pratt (Parks and Recreation) as one of the soldiers in the team that took down bin Laden. After his portrayal of Andy Dwyer on Parks, it's really hard for me to take Pratt seriously. He is so goofy in the show that every time he said something in the movie I felt like he was about to say a classic Andy line ("Wow, sounds like you're going some tough stuff right now. Too bad there's not doctors for your mind."). The relative anonymity of the cast works in the favor of the film's documentary-like feel, in that you're never taken out of the movie by seeing recognizable faces. They all seem like the real people, and in a movie like ZD30, that's a very good thing.

At a run time of over 2 and a half hours, ZD30 is long, but is paced relatively well. It slows a little bit in the middle, but once the location of bin Laden is exposed, the movie really takes off. The last 30 minutes are as intense as you'll see, and you know the ending! Kathryn Bigelow was majorly snubbed for not getting a best director nomination, probably having to do with the controversy surrounding the torture depicted in the film. She won for The Hurt Locker in 2010, but her work is about the same in quality on ZD30. The Hurt Locker was more intimately focused on a few soldiers fighting in the Middle East, while this film is more about the story than the characters. Characters come in and out quickly throughout the entire film; I honestly think that Maya was the only person whose name I remembered. I could have used a little more connection with the people involved with the hunt, but the story is so engaging that the movie is still very good.

When this film was first announced, I was heavily expecting it to be a very politics driven film designed to help President Obama win re-election. Bigelow does an incredible job of staying almost completely clear of politics and telling a story that is incredible on its own. ZD30 is yet another fantastic 2012 film. The more I catch up on the very best of last year, the more I'm blown away at the depth and quality of films it produced across many genres. I keep giving high ratings to these films, but it's because they're all deserved! Maybe I should go see that terrible looking magician movie with Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey to get a little perspective. Oh well.

4/5