Zero Dark Thirty (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2

Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker is a tough, brutal, violent, somber, contemporary war drama that examines how we have fought the war on terror in the Middle East, and, eventually, caught Osama bin Laden.  It has to be tough, brutal, violent and somber because of what bin Laden arranged on 9/11, and how that day changed the history of the world.  The movie, with its cryptic title that is never explained, is a relentless two-and-a-half hours of intricately detailed frustration that eventually ends with the death of the terrorist, and a palpable sense of relief from the various characters and agencies who hunted him for so long.

The real focus of this story is on the bureaucracy of the hunt.  The relatively small central group tasked with finding the terrorist is overworked, swamped with leads that run nowhere in a region difficult in which to operate, with distrust and suspicion everywhere.  Agencies ready to act are counting on this group for direction, but years pass before genuine clues begin to emerge.  One very promising avenue turns into tragedy because caution is subordinated to wishful thinking.  The key scene in this drama occurs when an analyst (Jessica Chastain) confronts her boss (Kyle Chandler), finally ranting at him because he is more concerned with current domestic threats than finding bin Laden.  That moment pinpoints the difficulty in finishing the task; people leave or burn out, priorities alter, time erodes purpose.  But Chastain’s character refuses to quit, and once she becomes convinced she knows where bin Laden is, she pushes and pushes until the raid to get him gets the go-ahead.

The movie’s authenticity is quite convincing, from the locations and equipment and tactics used in the hunt, to the personalities of the various people presented in the story.  Nothing seems out of place or thrust into the proceedings artificially.  It is all more or less based on the real events that led to bin Laden’s execution, and I think rather more than less.

Much has been made about the torture scenes that open the story, and despite the objections of our CIA, there is no doubt that such behavior took place.  There is also little doubt that the techniques of sleep deprivation, physical abuse, waterboarding and other such methods were ineffective at best in terms of gathering information. Artistically, it makes perfect sense to show the torture stuff at the beginning, as Chastain’s character arrives to help interrogate various prisoners, because it proves that torture doesn’t work, especially on fanatics.  Later, the analysts learn different methods and turn more to surveillance to reap intelligence.  That evolution of method is what changes the quality of information, and, ultimately, leads to better results.  It is this process that the movie very studiously celebrates.

The final half-hour or so depicts the Seal Team 6 raid into Pakistan to get bin Laden once and for all.  Ironically, it is this section that seemed most unrealistic to me, especially when the first helicopter essentially crash-lands in his compound and no one awakens to come take a look at it.  Bigelow directs this stealthy sequence with a great deal of hand-held camerawork, utilizing the same grainy, green-tinted night vision optics that the Seals were using.  She avoids staging bin Laden’s death as a vigilante-like retribution kill show (just imagine how Brian de Palma would have filmed it), and never shows his face clearly, obviously preferring not to mythologize the event (or give his followers any sense that he died a martyr).

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is on the same high level as The Hurt Locker technically and thematically.  It isn’t history; its historical aspects are fudged just enough to allow critics to carp about things with some accuracy.  It isn’t patriotic in the sense of the old rah-rah World War II propaganda kill-the-enemy tales; it is deeply critical of the methods employed during the Bush years and time wasted as leads dried up and blew away, and yet it celebrates, quietly, the fact that we were persistent enough to stick with it and finally get the job done, against tall odds.  It is an important, well-made movie, but it isn’t the gung-ho evil-trampling action movie that would probably have proven far more popular.  It is also a movie that I think has already seen its peak, and over time will slowly fade into obscurity as more and more detail emerges regarding the people involved and perhaps different facts that gradually distance what really happened from this interpretation of those events, impressive though this version certainly is.  ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2.  29 January 2013.

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