Important, yet heavy, meandering, and somewhat vacuous

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2013)

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty derives its title from clever spy language meaning half past an unspecified time after midnight, or the time when Seal Team Six finally killed known terrorist and Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. The film she has made only devotes about twenty-five minutes to that time period, which is a wise choice from her standpoint and screenwriter Mark Boal's. The remaining two hours leading up to that shows how the CIA finally got there, after numerous leads, little evidence, and a brave woman who went against their original ideas.
A large majority of the CIA believed that Osama Bin Laden was hiding in a remote cave, some miles away from the cities of Pakistan, and was sick and ailing. After a ten year manhunt, we finally found him, hiding in a large, heavily-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, not far away from a military college. And now we have a film glorifying and boasting our efforts. I was off-put by this idea, despite my positivity towards Bigelow and Boal's previous effort, The Hurt Locker. The whole concept seemed to be rather narcissistic and overly patriotic on the United States' part.
Thankfully, the film actually has a brain in its head and substance in mind. The story's shell is kept simple, yet the interworkings are much to complex and to keep things safe, I'll do some oversimplifying. We open with a collection of 911 calls from that faithful day twelve years ago that, I believe, needs no introduction. We cut to scenes set at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan, where Maya, played by the wonderful Jessica Chastain, accompanies Dan (Jason Clarke) during "enhanced interrogations," basically meaning that they involve tortuous methods. All the torture and endless questions are attempting to lead up to the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, and as the film goes on, we see how Maya climbs the social ladder of the CIA, to even going boldly against the word of the top representatives (Joel Edgerton) about where exactly he is hiding. After spotting a shady, plain white compound in the middle of Pakistan, with black windows and no third male living in a house with various females, Maya is 100% convinced that Bin Laden is residing in that large area, while the CIA clings to their idea that he is out in some cave in the middle of nowhere. They pragmatically believe that if not Bin Laden living there it is someone who clearly is evading the law, like a drug dealer.
The film works around this plot for about one-hundred and twenty five minutes, leaving the last act to center around the raid of the compound that has the outcome everyone is aware of. Bigelow still maintains the ability to surprise her audience in some sequences, mainly the Marriott Hotel bombing and the Camp Chapman attack. She concocts this very uncertain atmosphere in many of the instances when two characters meet to discuss a detail or an operation that works in the film's favor. The CIA dialog we are presented with is hit and miss. Some scenes, involving Maya talking with the analyst Steve (Mark Duplass, one of my favorite actors working today) are captured with the driest of wit, while others, show Maya desperately convincing several people in the organization she is right through polite conversation or shouting matches, become a tad overbearing and plod along with heavy jargon and a meandering focus.
The the grand difference between Zero Dark Thirty and Bigelow's Oscar winning Hurt Locker is the unfocused narrative. The Hurt Locker was about the deteriorating sanity of an Iraqi war veteran shown in a deep, intimate character study through a sensitive lens, which won me and a lot of others over. Zero Dark Thirty bears more weight and spans the course of a decade, making for a lot more material and a lot more events that Bigelow and Boal clearly struggle to capture. This causes some events to be more interesting and others to be only mildly amusing.
Much has been made about the fact that this film depicts instances of torture from a seemingly slanted perspective The torture sequences aren't much to blow out of proportions but the fact that they are close to what really happens. I'm not sure this film is partisan in any regard, and while it subtly states the reason why we knew where Bin Laden was located was because of a message obtained through waterboarding, another scene shows its occasional ineffectiveness by having a man scream various days when asked about when a bombing will take placed. It's a very original, even-handed approach.
Zero Dark Thirty is a film I'd still call important for its deep depiction of one of the largest manhunts in history, yet to call it a masterwork or even hold it up on a pedestal as one of the greatest espionage films of all time is strictly an overstatement. The film is tricky, informative, and occasionally entertaining, yet it's heavy, meandering, and shortchanging in the regards of characters. This can become a difficult thing to tolerate when the whole film is watching characters interact with others when morally just decisions are on the line or soon being proposed.
Read the more complete review at http://stevethemovieman.proboards.com