The ten years from '9/11' to the flushing out of Bin Laden.

Rating: Null/10 (26 April 2013)

This is a long movie at almost 2 1/2 hours, but it didn't seem long to me, all of it was interesting. It starts with a hint of remembrance of the 9/11 attacks, which started the hunt for Bin Laden. It ends with the raid that resulted in the death of Bin Laden. That is the title reference, 'Zero Dark Thirty' literally means 30 minutes after midnight, but can also be a general reference to doing a mission in the dead of night.
The script and ultimate movie is an interesting story in itself. It started out being one thing, because after so many years it did not look like Bin Laden would be found and caught. But when he was, the last part of the script had to be re-written, to reflect a whole different arc.
There are many fine actors involved, and I don't want to diminish any of them, but the critical role is Jessica Chastain as Maya , who had been hired on out of high school and her first assignment, which lasted 12 years, was the hunt for Bin Laden. There wasn't a real Maya, but in fact she was a composite of several female agents who were mainly responsible for finding Bin Laden.
Ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden revealed that the top bin Laden hunter in the movie appropriately symbolizes a "band of sisters" responsible for finding the terrorist, clearly the character in the movie is a composite. "Most of the people who briefed me on Osama bin Laden were women officers of the CIA. But Maya is a composite." He added: "I think it does a masterful job at suggesting that in the real world, there are no right angles and there are no easy answers to very difficult situations. And that to me was a great service."
Most of the first 2 hours' running time is the build-up to the capture. It shows interrogation techniques, use of foreign intelligence contacts, tapping of phones, tracing and tracking down the messenger, because for security there were no electronic connections from the Bin Laden compound to the rest of the world. But with persistence and good detective work they tracked him down.
The raid and its aftermath, including the identification by Maya that the body indeed was that of Bin Laden back at the base took only about 25 minutes of the movie's running time. That raid sequence was done very realistically, in a set that was built to duplicate, as accurately as they knew how, Bin Laden's compound.
All in all an excellent movie. And the BD has a set of interesting extras on different facets of the "making of" the movie.