Nice Mystery-Thriller Type Story

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2013)

There was movie a long time ago, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," about some bungling mafia guys. ZDT could be subtitled "The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight," in reference to the bungling at the highest levels of the CIA that unnecessarily prolonged the track-down of Osama Bin Laden, except that this movie focuses on the analyst who stuck to the job and got it done, with only fleeting glimpses of the higher-level nitwits in D.C. that she had to deal with right up to the day of the climactic raid. I liked the way the story was told as a detective mystery thriller, not a military action violence-soaked saga like so many other war movies have been lately. Well, after all, the raid on Bin Laden's hideout lasted less than an hour anyway. What came up missing, though, was the backdrop of politics that pervades all decision-making in the CIA/Defense Department, and how their incompetence helped delay the tracking down of Osama Bin Laden. One scene depicts a suicide bomb attack at a "secure CIA base" in the Afghanistan in December 2009 killing eight Americans including a DC-based analyst, a direct result of CIA administrators bypassing security measures and sabotaging that analyst's efforts at finding Bin Laden, but we don't get that political backdrop in the movie. The heroine of Zero Dark Thirty had to have faced the same political hurdles, but all we see are the male vs. female attitude conflicts, like a bunch of guys in a meeting room who can only give the CIA Director 60 percent confidence they've found their target because they're afraid of saying 100-percent and putting their careers on the line. If the story/movie is accurate, my first question is "if this is the gal who found Bin Laden, why isn't she running the CIA now?" Well, because she's a woman, that's why, and the movie makes that crystal clear. It would have enhanced the movie to include scenes of what Bin Laden was doing in his lair all that time, based on what we now know that he wasn't "in the background of Al Qaeda" like many CIA thought simply because his house wasn't on the electric grid. It never occurred to these guys how a guy who hid in caves could mastermind 9/11, he could just as easily keep running the outfit while hiding in an apartment? Duh! The performance by Jessica Chastain is well worth the acclaim she has received for it.