The only member of the cast who came shining though the dross was James Gandolfini in a cameo role.

Rating: 5/10 (19 April 2016)

This is the true story of the decade-long hunt for Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L.s in May 2011. I am not a fan of this type of movie, and I regard Zero Dark Thirty is the same 'type' of movie as 'Argo'; both involve CIA sponsored special assignments in hostile territory, one involving a rescue and the other involving a capture. Unfortunately Argo succeeded, where Zero Dark Thirty fell utterly flat. By the time these gallant American forces were traipsing through Bin Laden's compound in almost total darkness, I for one had lost all interest in the eventual outcome – and in any case I already knew exactly what happened.
I can certainly see why the so-called 'establishment' and even the White House are not too happy about the amount torture scenes in the movie. I happen to be in the school of thought that just maybe in very extreme circumstances, a degree of psychological torture, which could include the use of water, may be justified. However, I was frankly shocked at the amount footage devoted to some pretty brutal torture scenes at the start of the movie. I have no idea how accurate this was, but to have something approaching 30 minutes of torture footage seemed to be overdoing it a bit, and it really wasn't very entertaining.
The movie then jumped somewhat disjointedly through the next decade, with our gallant heroine almost single-handedly and doggedly pursuing the trail to Bin laden with just about everyone else around her writing her off as a bit of a crackpot. Whether this is accurate or whether the writers used a degree of poetic licence to make the story more interesting, I couldn't say, and I don't really care. No matter how hard the filmmakers tried, I just couldn't invest any excitement in the whole process. We knew all knew where it would end and nothing happened to capture our interest or imagination in the meantime. Most, if not all the characters were 'one dimensional' caricatures; either Islamic terrorists or cynical, hard-bitten CIA operatives. I read somewhere that the popular TV terrorist series 'Homeland' was akin to a pathetic comic book when compared to the exciting action in Zero Dark Thirty. I beg to differ. Homeland is an exciting action movie with characters you can relate to and believe in. It is vastly to superior to Zero Dark Thirty.
OK, Zero Dark Thirty is a true story, so that makes it more difficult to invent exciting plot twists, but that doesn't prevent the producers from doing much better with what they had – after all what could be a better story than the capture and killing of one of the most horrific and reviled terrorist leaders the world has ever known? As for character development – Zero dark zero. The writer would have done well to study the character of 'Carrie', the heroine in Homeland as a template for their fleshing out of Maya, the heroine of Zero Dark Thirty. Jessica Chastain did the best she could with the material available, but if sitting alone in a huge cargo plane after she had completed her assignment was supposed to move us all to tears, then she and director Bigelow had better think again. The only member of the cast who came shining though the dross was James Gandolfini in a cameo role as the CIA Director.
As the long movie plodded to its grim anti-climax, my wife went to watch the news on another TV. She was lucky - the closing scenes were the worst of all. It was so dark and shadowy that most of the time you couldn't work out what in God's name was going on. They kept running around the compound, mumbling inaudibly, occasionally blowing open doors and even more occasionally killing someone. We were given no clues as to part of the compound they were in or how far away they were from where Bin Laden was located, or who were the people being killed. After about ten minutes of all this confusing shooting and mumbling in the dark, we no longer cared.
We saw women screaming and kids being shepherded into bedrooms, but we didn't know who they were and we still didn't know where Bin Laden was. Finally a man whose face was off camera was somehow dragged to the ground and shot. We never saw his face, only the very bottom part of his beard and we never saw any of the real action that we know took place, as the Americans took great pride in telling it all to the world, immediately after they shot him. On the other hand we saw in the grimmest and most microscopic detail the torture of detained terrorists and also the blowing up and shooting of innocent people, including CIA operatives by the jihadists.
So we could see 'our side' being blown up and see all the wicked tortures in graphic detail but only dark, shadowy 'suggestions' of the last moments on Earth of Bin Laden. We didn't see his burial at sea and neither did we see Obama and his cabinet colleagues watching from the Whitehouse. I really hope they managed to get a better view of what took place than we the people did in this pathetic apology of a movie. I reiterate that I am not a particular fan of this type of movie genre, but even so, I thought that Director Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 movie 'Hurt Locker' was a good, highly watchable movie with well- drawn characters and deserved its best movie Oscar. In my humble opinion she really needs to go back to the drawing board and get her game together, as Zero Dark Thirty falls seriously short of what she previously achieved with Hurt Locker. I am aware that not many will agree with me.