Ignore the controversy over whether the Americans used torture in their hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark 30 is a boots- on- the- ground suspense thriller about the raid on his compound in Abbottabad which left Bin Laden and three others dead. The movie is a draining, morally complex exercise that owes it success to director Kathryn Ann Bigelow and to Jessica Chastain, in the role of Maya, the CIA operative whose intuition about the Al Qaeda leader is ignored by her superiors, including the head of the CIA, (James Gandolfini) precisely because she is woman.
Chastain, who won a Golden Globe for her meticulously controlled portrayal of a conflicted avenging agent was on the money in her acceptance speech when she said the film disobeys the conventions of Hollywood because it empowers women. When is the last time you’ve seen a heroine take on the CIA , win, and then be able to boast about it in a quietly triumphant declaration to her boss: “I’m the mother fucker that found the place, sir!”
The movie spans a nine-year period that begins shortly after the 9-11 attacks and ends 19 months ago. The suspense builds slowly starting during the Bush years as the CIA tries to get a lead on Al Qaeda terrorists who brought down the World Trade Towers. When the compound where some ” bad guys” may be is finally located in Pakistan during Obama’s first term in office, no one is certain whether Bin Laden himself is in it. Not about to risk another debacle like the one that led the U.S. into a needless and senseless war in Iraq, the military operation to take him out can’t proceed unless the investigators offer proof positive that Bin Laden is in fact, in the building.
Maya has a hunch he is. She builds her case combining small clues with intuition, follows inconclusive leads, ends up with some dead ends and all the while withstands the ridicule of a CIA boss (Mark Strong) who orders his team to “Bring me people to kill.”
The final half hour of the film is a terrifying twenty-five minutes of dark, green-tinted movement as seen through night-vision goggles worn by the Navy Seals as they break into the compound, search the place and carry out their executions. The film also works because unknown actors add to the realism of the moment. Zero Dark 30 is not as good as Bigelow’s Oscar winning The Hurt Locker but it is riveting. Even though we knows how it is going to end we are never certain how it will get there.
Best described as a “Mockumentary” Zero Dark 30 takes its name from the military code for 12:30 a.m., when the Seal Raid actually occurred. In spite of the controversial buzz being circulated about its “authenticity” the film neither condones the use of torture, nor does it condemn it. The provocative waterboarding scenes early in the movie are there to illustrate how easy it is for anyone to compromise their ethics and principles under threat and when you are blinded by patriotism.
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