New Cinema Verite

Rating: 8/10 (14 January 2013)

If not for Jessica Chastain's character "Maya", this film could easily qualify as a documentary. Chastain's character, reportedly an amalgam of a number of individuals who worked the Bin Laden file at the CIA over the 10 years since the 11 September 2001 attacks, provides the narrative focus for the film. She is the eyes through which we see Bush's "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the dubious manner in which they supply information to the Forces of Light. We see one interrogator's tenuous ties with humanity, which finally wins out (though his monkeys, no less). We see the chronology of al Quada's attacks on the west and the way in which they affect Maya and the CIA (and remind us of the effects on US!).
Much has been made of the torture depicted in this film. People should see it dramatized realistically, as this "enhanced interrogation" were the techniques employed by Americans' own government, with complicit help from many Western countries, including my Canada (Google Mayar Ahrar). This is our 'moral' legacy of 10 (now 12) years of war against the 'evil doers'. It is also testament to what Obama changed when he came to the White House, and the change of focus and methodology that the CIA ultimately brought to bear to finally locate Bin Laden.
Indeed, many documentary films and TV programmes utilize re-enacted vignettes to dramatize the history they proport to tell. Kathryn Bigelow reshot the ending to this film after Bin Laden's death at the hands of SEAL Team 6 on 1 May 2011. I wonder what the original ending looks like? Unlike many so-called 'dramas', which are nothing more the overacted 'gun plays' (the new name for a genre?), this is history as it should be dramatized: believable characters believably acted, real events, and an absolutely wonderful recreation of the Abottabad raid.
While the climax raid is graphic, it is remarkably sanitized compared to something like "Django Unchained". Consequently, "Zero Dark Thirty" reminds us of what real violence, in any form looks like, and the terror it invokes upon the givers and receivers of such violence. It is worth remembering the number if women and children who were present in Bin Laden's compound when the raid took place. It was nice to see the degree of care the SEALs took to ensure minimal "collateral damage" during the raid.
It is also nice to see the maturity and growth that Katheryn Bigelow has experienced since her years between directing "Point Break", "Strange Days", and this film. The only other comparator that comes to my mind is Spielberg's "Munich"- Bigelow is the superior director in the historical realism stakes, as she knows that in portraying real people, "less" is certainly more......
I can't recommend this film enough.