If you know what to expect, it's very good

Rating: 8/10 (1 February 2013)

The main hot political potato that has arisen with the film is the subject of whether or not it champions torture, and whether it was, in this case, successful or not as a means to obtain information. For me, there are two very straightforward things to say on the matter. Firstly, and backing up my feeling that the film maker remains at a moral remove from the subject, I am not entirely sure what the people who are upset about it wanted; torture occurred regardless of our feelings about it, and as Bigelow has pointed out, to not depict this part of the story would be dishonest. Secondly, the very fact there is a raging debate as to whether the movie does or does not champion its use is evidence, in itself, that it does not make it a clean-cut, black and white case. Unlike other reviews, I will not spoil the movie by mentioning the crux of a key plot point in relation to the matter, but it could be well argued that the film remains deliberately neutral on it. Boal and Bigelow put the subject out there for debate, seemingly playing devil's advocate in terms of their own feelings; I suspect they felt it would be wrong to imprint their personal stance on a film such as this.
This film is larger in scope than The Hurt Locker, but they actually share a lot of DNA; both are timely works about the war, and both are notable for examining the psychology of their central character, the big difference being that one film is set in the midst of the hot zone and about a group dynamic, while the other shows us a war which becomes almost personal, and is fought from behind a desk. Where The Hurt Locker had the freedom afforded it by not being based on a set of events, Zero Dark Thirty adheres very strictly to a specific set of events, namely the zig, zags and frustrating dead ends that were the decade-long hunt for the world's most wanted terrorist.
This is, at once, a strength and a weakness of the movie; the film focuses on detailing one event after another, with a cold precision and little character development. Thankfully, the movie is crafted in such a way that, despite knowing how it ends, as with Apollo 13, we find ourselves gripped by the details of the hows, whys and wherefores. Nevertheless, whilst the who's who of a cast all give believable performances, there is generally the sense that you are simply a fly on the wall, not getting to know these people, but rather watching things play out, in the moment. There are two exceptions to this, one being Dan, the expert in "enhanced interrogation techniques", who in another context you feel you could like. He is played by the fantastic Jason Clarke, previously of Lawless; his lack of nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars is a huge oversight. The other is Maya herself; Chastain plays a woman who does not give much away, and so it is understandable that, to some, her performance seems flat, and certainly not worthy of her Oscar nomination. I will not say she deserves to win it, but I definitely disagree that it is a flat performance; on the contrary, she actually has some rather amusing and deftly written dialogue, which is a pleasant surprise, and I find the subtle shifts in her character's psychology, the growth of her obsession, even in the face of people telling her to let it go, to be one of the most compelling elements of the film.
And it is on her performance the film takes its final bow; Zero Dark Thirty goes out, not with a bang, but on a downbeat. The final half hour of the movie is a well-executed, realistic depiction of the raid of the house and the killing of Osama, and yet we miss the drama of the preceding two hours. Could this be the point? Maya's tears and final exhalation are of what? Relief or joy? She's not smiling. Sadness? Understanding of loss? Perhaps it is something not so easily captured in just one word or phrase, but one things is for sure, you know you are looking at a character who, like us, found that the chase became more important than the objective, and only now has come to realise that the last decade of her life has yielded nothing; no friends, no love, no family, no real home, nothing but one man's death. At one point in the movie, upon being asked what she has done for the CIA other than this, she has to answer: "Nothing, I have done nothing else." You do not leave this film, with its quiet closing credit score, feeling at ease or like it celebrates anything, other than perhaps the bravery of the men who put their life on the line for an important job; the movie actually leaves us with an unexpected feeling of hollowness. This is a thoughtful movie, put together by somebody who understands it is not a simple subject to relay; it doesn't tell the audience what to think, and there are those who might not like or admit that. Those of the general public passing judgement on a subject about which they know little, especially when they have not even bothered to see the film, are, I believe, bandwagon jumpers who like the sound of their own, mostly ill-informed ramblings, and who should perhaps see the film first.