gr8 film

Rating: 9/10 (19 February 2013)

It's been said numerous times elsewhere but zero dark thirty really feels like it should have been made 20 years from now. The film employs an objective observational style to some highly contentious and prescient issues still at the forefront of America's political and military conscious.
This film seems to have jazzed everyone off with the conservative right proclaiming it as pro-Obama propaganda and many on the left stating that the way in which torture is depicted is dangerous and morally wrong to even be shown. That first point I won't touch on but I've read pieces from people such as Alex Gibney who I respect highly attacking the film for depicting torture as more effective than it actually is. I strongly disagree with this as no effective information is ever really yielded from the interrogations, and although there is a greater statement to be made about the wider reality of "advanced interrogation techniques" yielding extremely little and unreliable information on high ranking members of Al-Qaeda, that simply isn't the story the film is telling. In fact I feel these sidebars and themes that get pushed into the background in the hunt for Bin Laden heightens the drama on display showing the lows a country was willing to sink to in its hunt for revenge (I'm not opposed to him getting capped, rather delighted actually).
The film is divided into 4 sections and all offer different yet important aspects of the whole operation while remaining a cogent whole. My personal favourite scene in the film is a conversation between Mark Strong and Stephen Dillane discussing the statistical probabilities involved in the assault compared to those that justified the invasion of Iraq which is masterwork, mad props to Mark Boal on that one.
I feel the movie kind of negates the need for other films on this subject matter through its exhaustive attention to detail for the entirety of the 11 or so years it takes place in and should be viewed as a reliable text on a lot of what America meant to the world for this period in history.
Quickly, Jessica Chastain and pretty much the entire cast are awesome, the night raid sequence is tense as all hell, the score is quickly becoming a personal favourite (if a little derivative of Desplat's past work on Syriana) and the direction and writing meld superbly. I wish Kathryn Bigelow was up for a second Oscar on this one but I'm sure this film will be remembered for many more years than whatever does win for 2012.