Dancing in quicksand..

Rating: 9/10 (25 January 2013)

Zero Dark Thirty is a compelling film with a real chance of making the largest number of people, yet, to introspect and come to their own conclusions about the war on terror, its troubling origins and its continuing cost.After one Sunday of watching Bin Laden's killing on the news networks, most Americans and the rest of the world went back to business.Several scholarly books and newspaper articles tried to overwhelm us with information and commentary on the greatest manhunt ever.Most of these did not find itself into the consciousness of the masses who continue to struggle with economic realities despite the "Osama Bin Laden is Dead and General Motors is Alive" rhetoric. Zero Dark Thirty arrives at an opportune time.
The debate about torture is meaningless, we will always be willing to kill for stuff that the powerful value, like political mileage.Its a technique as old as the hills.Obama may try to rise above torture, but drone strikes are nothing but a rich nation swatting flies for political gain. Drones are neat, so must have been torture when it was invented.Rendition, the 2007 film by Gavin Hood was an impassioned commentary on torture and put a huge question mark about its effectiveness. Zero Dark Thirty is brilliantly scripted and shot by the team of journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal and veteran director Kathryn Bigelow. It holds our attention for all of its 150 mins runtime, which is remarkable because we all know the ending.In the course of the very complex hunt for Bin Laden we see lots of torture, small victories in eliminating some key players, large losses in the continued terror attracts around the world except on American soil, and more importantly a regime change.We are swept up in the passion of Maya, a low level CIA operative played by the increasingly brilliant Jessica Chastain. She pursues her hunch about a courier with great single mindedness and embodies the promise of both Bush and Obama to hunt down Bin Laden.
In its own way its also a film about work, how we approach our jobs and how wide the gamut of human experience can be, if we cared to look.The question of what motivates Maya remains open.She remains an enigma till the very end, true to her name which also means "illusion" in Sanskrit. How I wish Maya was an environmentalist! The most important events in history take a very long time for society to assimilate.The assassination of JFK has still not been resolved, nor of Mahatma Gandhi.Some of the issues that were at the heart of Gandhi's assassination will surface in 2014 when India goes to the polls.Its just that they will not be linked directly to his death. Perhaps a long way off in the future there will be somebody like Oliver Stone who will rake up the Bin Laden killing to illuminate issues in America but for the moment Zero Dark Thirty must serve as the first cinematic draft of history.This is another milestone in the growing importance of film as the current medium of choice to engage with history. Obama's address to the Islamic world from Cairo, which was dubbed an apology tour, was a step in the right direction and so is a growing reluctance to go to war in far corners of the world.The Iraq war has amply illustrated the futility of shoving profound political change down the throat of a people who will continue to engage in bloody battles on Shia Sunni lines. Zero Dark Thirty shows us the high cost of capturing a high value target, both human and material and the long term cost which must be paid by future generations. A forgotten film by Wim Wenders called Land of Plenty made in 2005 captured a fractured post 9/11 American state in a beautiful and sensitive way. The Clash of Civilizations, a theory proposed by Samual Huntington which identifies cultural and religious differences as the fountainhead of future conflict, is certainly underway.While the world obsesses over the nuclear weapons Iran is building, it conveniently forgets that Pakistan is the most dangerous and unstable owner of a huge nuclear arsenal.When this clash of civilizations takes a turn for the worse, India is likely to be biggest collateral damage in history, thanks to the Pakistani militaries cunning use of India to maintain its grip on that failed state. Charlie Wilson's War was a smart Hollywood comedy which depicted the genesis of the whole Afghanistan/Pakistan crisis that is unfolding today.
As a people we continue to dance in quicksand.