Trust the Hype

Rating: 10/10 (8 January 2013)

For over eleven years now the War on Terror has dominated global foreign policy and has transformed America as we know it. One can hardly remember what life was like before 9/11 anymore. Since then we have been in a constant state of war and, in many ways, a constant state of fear. We have given up many of our own liberties, abandoned many of our stated principles and have sacrificed thousands of our own in an attempt to "make us safe." Where do we go from here?
If you are looking for a film to validate your own political position on America's recent international exploits, Zero Dark Thirty is not for you. If you want a film to take a moral stand on perhaps the most significant event(s) of your lifetime, you may want to look to a different source. Zero Dark Thirty transcends politics. It isn't a film that tells us we were right or we were wrong. It's a film that shows us what lengths we went through to kill the man responsible. Kathryn Bigelow's masterful follow up to the much lauded "The Hurt Locker" is no doubt the best film of the year, and I think it is an important movie in the history of American cinema.
The film is led by Jessica Chastain's astounding performance as Maya, a CIA operative who dedicates more then 10 years to finding Osama Bin Laden. The film begins with Dan (played by Jason Clarke) who is interrogating a detainee named Ammar (played by Reda Kateb) while Maya observes from the corner. Amid the torture, which is often hard to watch, Dan steps out of the room for a quick minute at which point Ammar begs Maya for help, for compassion. For a second it appears as though Maya may succumb and help the poor man, but instead she replies with stony passion, "You can help yourself by being truthful." Jessica Chastain's Maya goes against the conventional "female" role often given to women in Hollywood. These roles are generally broken down into two categories: sluts and mothers/wives, and usually involves plenty of tears and emotions. Very rarely do we see a bad-ass female character like Maya surface. At the same time Maya is neither the bad girl or the good girl of this story. She's not the evil stepmother, nor is she the fairy godmother. She is a shade of gray.
Perhaps the same can be said for the movie as a whole. It isn't really a heroic tale, nor one of failure and defeat. It is somewhere in between. The film takes us on a decade long journey in America's effort to bring justice to the worlds most hated and notorious terrorist. Throughout the struggles and hardships, we finally reach our goal. We find out where Osama Bin Laden is hiding, and after months of surveillance and planning, we go in for the kill. The last 30 minutes of the film are breathtaking, as the SEAL team boards helicopters and make the journey to the compound in Abatobad. Controversy has, of course, surrounded this film as many decry it's use of torture. These people believe that just because it doesn't take a firm stand against torture means that it must be pro-torture. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, we shouldn't need a movie to tell us that torture is wrong, we have a conscience for that. Secondly, the film is a story about the War on Terror, and to omit torture completely would not tell the full story. Whether torture directly led to finding Osama Bin Laden or not, torture was used in the hunt and it was important that we saw this in the film.
The real brilliance of Zero Dark Thirty comes with the allegory of Maya, however. In many ways Maya represents the country as a whole. Like Maya we invested a decade in this hunt for Bin Laden. Like Maya we sacrificed a lot for this war. For the last ten years we have put all of ourselves (as a nation) into this single goal. Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, and the War in Afghanistan is coming to an end, where do we go from here? Maya is asked this same question at the end of Zero Dark Thirty. It is a question she cannot answer. Perhaps in her zealousness, and in our own zealousness to find and punish terrorists, we lost ourselves along the way. Now as this difficult time comes to a close, we should perhaps sit down and take a moment, as Maya does in the film, to think about what we have done over the last decade and reflect on what we lost, and more importantly reflect on where we go from here.