A Single-minded Obsession

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2013)

Kathryn Bigelow should not be regarded just for being a female director making excellent movies in the male-director dominated field of action / war movies. She should be regarded just as a being an exceptional director of action / war movies. Zero Dark Thirty is the meticulously crafted account of of the intelligence gathering operation and the actual special ops night-time raid that resulted in the killing of Bin Laden.
Jessica Chastain plays Maya, the CIA field operative obsessed with untangling the tangled skein of threads that lead to the shadowy guy who could be Bin Laden's courier. Maya has no back story, no idea of the future, just the present and her hunger for the quest. Chastain was a good choice for the role, with her spare, ascetic look reinforcing the characters single-minded, compulsive desire to hunt down Bin Laden.
The film is crammed with sharp performances from the large, ensemble cast. James Gandolfini as the CIA Director and Joel Edgerton as the leader of the DEVGRU (Seal Tim Six) raiding team were very convincing, but I was particularly taken by the always fantastic Mark Strong as George, a senior CIA official, and by Jason Clarke's portrayal of Dan, Maya's boss in the field and the CIA's blunt instrument - torturing captives for information.
Which brings us to the point that has created a maelstrom of controversy around the movie: its supposed depiction of torture as a successful intelligence-gathering strategy in the hunt for Bin Laden. I believe the film's point is somewhat more subtle - the actual torture scenes are brutal - there is also the recognition within the torturer's mind that it is dehumanizing and corrosive. Most telling is Dan's admission that he just wants to go back and "do something normal". Also, the political minefield surrounding "enhanced interrogation" is well-depicted: "you don't want to be the one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee descends...".
A final word on depiction of the actual raid which took place at Zero Dark Thirty (half past midnight, hence the name): it has a breathless, edge-of-your-seat quality, accentuated by the fact that a significant portion of the action is shown through a night-vision filter, giving it an eerie, other-worldly feel. And, despite our conditioning by the movies to expect fast-paced, kinetic, large-sound, jump-cut edited action sequences in such scenarios, the raid is absolutely absorbing, compelling even, moving at an almost leisurely pace - a triumph of editing and cinematography.