Redhead In The Heart Of Darkness

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2013)

Not even two years after the event, the movie about the decade-long pursuit and killing of Al Qaeda terrorist leader and 9/11 plotter Osama Bin Laden comes to the big screen. It's been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, so I was expecting something incredible.
It reminded me a little of The French Connection with the hero obsessed with catching the bearded bad guy leading to a downbeat, make-up-your-own-mind conclusion. It also reminded me of The Silence of the Lambs with the female protagonist up against a sexist, bureaucratic male brick wall as she tries to put an end to an evil man's killing spree.
While Zero Dark Thirty is fascinating on a technical front and very good on the methods used to hunt Bin Laden, it falls down on the most important front: characterisation. The lead character is called simply Maya (we never find out her surname, not even a fictitious one). We only find out two personal things about her; she was recruited to the CIA from high school and she has no friends (remember how we were made to care about Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs with all the childhood memories about the death of her cop father?). So we know almost nothing about Maya and therefore we don't really care about her. It's hard to care about a character you've seen torturing suspects anyway, even if they are allegedly guilty. Maya is also charmless and humourless and there is no comic relief in a film of two and a half hours. I don't believe Maya would be allowed to harass her superior by writing on his window in red ink every day or that she would describe herself as a "motherf***er" to the head of the CIA without some sort of reprimand.
Reviewers have been raving about Jessica Chastain's performance and I have to wonder why. She was okay in it. I can't really see anything great about her performance mostly because her part is underwritten as such a one-note character. Only in the final scene does she do anything impressive with some very convincing tears but up until then, it was an average performance.
Also, Seal Team Six, the team that eventually killed Bin Laden, are portrayed as a bunch of bored jocks goofing off in the desert. They even get put down by Maya and just stand there like dummies. Again, I didn't believe that an elite unit of extremely tough men like them would take that from anyone. It really downplays Seal Team Six's significance in the whole thing and gives Maya credit for everything. This is a female director making a feminist point and I do believe she has taken a lot of creative licence to get that point across and the film suffers for it.
As virtually every reviewer has remarked, the last half hour with the assault on Bin Laden's compound is the best part of the film with director Kathryn Bigelow in her element. No more torture, no more talking, no more feminist point-scoring, it is pure action and suspense. You finally start to feel something. Even though we all know the outcome, the stakes are enormous. It's like a mini-film within a film like the stoned helicopter sequence in Goodfellas. With Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters and Bin Laden's codename Geronimo, it seems the Indian Wars are still ongoing at least in the American psyche. Geronimo is defeated once more and his body flown out where it is formally identified by the all-powerful Maya.
The film ends ambiguously with the line: "Where do you want to go?" as Maya sits alone in a huge plane crying. Is Kathryn Bigelow desperate to re-establish the character's femininity in the last scene after stomping through the film with a ruthless, robotic persona? Is Maya crying for herself or for what she's done in the movie? Is she crying because her 10-year obsession Bin Laden is dead and her life is essentially pointless now? Is it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PMT? Your guess is as good as mine.
As I was leaving the cinema, I overheard some middle-aged people debating the film. This woman said she believed that Bin Laden is still alive and that the movie was only saying he was dead for propaganda purposes. It seems the mysterious, invincible aura of Osama Bin Laden still exists for some people. For me, he is dead. I mourn not his passing but at what we have become in the fight against him.