Incredibly Wearing (As It Should Be)

Rating: 9/10 (10 March 2013)

Why you shouldn't see it:
If movies that come to a slow boil aren't likely to hold your attention, there's a chance Zero Dark Thirty won't either. It covers a time period of nearly ten years, and you feel the length of the film accordingly. Each minute wears on you as time passes by with no real headway in the search for arguably history's most wanted man, and you begin to wonder whether it was all really worth all the fuss (and time... and effort... and cost...) of watching people look for him. This movie is drama much more than it is suspense, action, or anything one could remotely consider "light" (there are moments of levity, but they are more brief breaks from the slow-mounting tension than anything genuinely comical).
With the main characters of this movie all being CIA and military special forces, you might expect it to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller. While there are a couple moments of thrills, the vast majority is spent wondering where the thrills ran off to. Between a moderately graphic torture scene at the beginning and a raid on UBL's compound at the end, there's mostly just a lot of talking and scheming and thinking and nerve-wearing stretching of moments.
If you prefer for your movies to present you with some sort of agenda, as though Hollywood is responsible for calibrating your own moral compass, this one might not do the trick. It presents its material in a surprisingly even-handed light, which has reportedly bothered some of the more negative-minded critics out there. Since this film features depictions of distasteful acts, in the opinion of some, it is the job of the filmmaker to make obvious her distaste for said acts instead of simply portraying the story unfiltered.
Why you should see it:
On the surface of it, Zero Dark Thirty is, in the mold of both Argo and Lincoln this year, an expertly told historical tale. It takes an event about which most of us know many of the details and still makes it a gripping film going experience. When I take a step back and think about it, I realize that it's pretty inappropriate for me to catch myself holding my breath while watching any movie, let alone one with an ending of which I am quite familiar. And yet, that's exactly what this movie did to me, even more so than either of its historical counterparts among this year's crop of nominees.
I could probably talk at length about any number of things that I consider strengths of this movie. The brilliantly understated performances of every member of the cast, not least of all Jessica Chastain, which allow the film to be driven by the slow grind of the developing plot and the atmosphere it creates. The deft and even-handed treatment of the (only partially known) source material that allows the audience to draw its own conclusions regarding both the means and the end of the hunt for Bin Laden. The distinct lack of blatant Hollywood moments used to artificially amp up the suspense of each moment, which intriguingly does much more to draw the viewer into those very moments. And, not necessarily the movie itself, but - the trailer, which perfectly conveys to the viewer exactly what to expect from the movie without spoiling any of it (I seriously love this trailer, even more than I typically love trailers, which is saying a lot).
But what I really want to talk about is something else entirely. Or, more appropriately, maybe it's the combination of all of the above that leads to something that has really stuck with me as a movie-going experience I'm not used to. Now switching to explicitly first person, since it's the only voice that really seems appropriate:
When I was leaving the theater, I knew that I had been made to feel something, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was. Then, as I thought back through the events of the movie, I realized that I hadn't felt "something" at all. I had felt a number of things, and those feelings had corresponded exactly with Jessica Chastain's character Maya. And, by reflection, my own feelings on the UBL manhunt itself. Ranging from discomfort to resolve to determination to jadedness to exhaustion to relief, and, as the screen went black: emptiness. I had just devoted nearly three hours of my life to watching this movie - much like the characters devoted nearly ten years of their lives to catching Bin Laden, and the closing impression we were all left with was emptiness. Not the kind of emptiness that accompanies the depressed thoughts of "why did I just watch this movie," but instead the kind of emptiness that hit Maya like a hammer when she pondered her past and wondered how that could point her to any future.
In Short:
To be honest, if you have seen the trailer, you should know exactly what to expect from Zero Dark Thirty (unless you're bad at watching trailers... it's not a skill everyone has). I saw in it one of the best and most evocative trailers I've ever encountered, and that's pretty much exactly the kind of movie I ended up seeing. It's subtle yet direct, clear in purpose yet uncertain in meaning. I recommend it with a 9 out of 10, because while it isn't necessarily what I enjoy about movies, it is certainly what I appreciate about them.
Exceptions to the recommendation: if you prefer your waterboarding to be in a more private setting, people who actually enjoy the artificial, Hollywood-injected moments of suspense, if you would rather your media present you with one slant or another so that you don't have to risk getting lost in the uncertainty of your own self-resolved morality, if you're an Osama Bin Laden apologist.