An authentic look at the capture of the most infamous villain of all time.

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2014)

Zero Dark Thirty is a high stakes cat-and-mouse game that spans ten years and multiple countries. It turns out that the hunt for the world's most notorious killer doesn't only take place on the ground with soldiers, but also in rooms buzzing with computer monitors and crowded market places.
Zero Dark Thirty tells the story of the ten year manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. The story follows Maya, a CIA officer tasked with tracking down and capturing Bin Laden. Maya is played to perfection by Jessica Chastain. Chastain infuses Maya with a steely focus that is downright disturbing. Maya would do anything to bring Bin Laden to justice and you can literally see this desperation on every line of her face.
The film picks up two years after 9/11. We are thrust in the middle of a brutal interrogation. Maya is visibly disturbed by the torture going on before her. As the film goes on and the years slip away, Maya is no longer bothered by the act of torture. So much so that she is now giving the orders to torture a detainee. The futile attempt to find Bin Laden has hardened Maya. Her morals have been compromised, yet she never reflects on this, nor are we supposed to. The film portrays the torture scenes in a matter of fact manner. A shrug of the shoulders and a "we did what we had to do" response is implied.
Maya is the focal point of the film, the thread that ties the whole story together, but the movie never becomes about her. It toes that fine line expertly. We never see Maya's personal life, we never see her "let her hair down" and we never see any flirty scenes with a co-worker. This isn't that type of movie and it's all the better for it. When asked what else she has done for the CIA besides look for Bin Laden Maya replies, "I've done nothing else." Even when she is drinking a can of soda on the couch, she's channel surfing through news channels just looking for any nugget of information. She's constantly checking her phone for updates. The search for Bin Laden has literally consumed her life.
Make no mistake about it, Zero Dark Thirty is Chastain's movie. She has solidified herself as one of the top actresses working today. Her meteoric rise to fame is actually pretty amazing. She was virtually unknown before 2011. She then appeared in seven movies in 2011 nabbing an Oscar nomination for her role as the bubbly yet sad housewife in The Help. She also earned raves for her performance as a gentle, carefree mother in Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life. I'm not sure I've seen an actor burst upon the scene like Jessica Chastain has done.
Zero Dark Thirty also doesn't pay a lot attention to the fact that Maya is a woman working in a male dominated environment. There are no confrontations with male co-workers or scenes where Maya has to prove herself to her male superiors. Again, it's not that type of movie. That being said, it's hard not to see the parallels between Maya and Kathryn Bigelow as a director. She too works in a male dominated profession. Especially since she isn't relegating herself to romantic comedies.
The climax of the film is one of the most tense, edge-of-your-seat sequences I've seen in a film in a long time. In a different movie, the soldiers would have raided the compound with guns blazing shooting anything that moved. Instead, Zero Dark Thirty gives us a textbook, methodical raid. Even though the whole sequence is slow paced, it builds the tension perfectly. You could literally hear a pin drop in the theater during the whole raid. We see most of the action through cameras mounted on the helmets of the soldiers. This gives the whole sequence a very authentic feel.
On the surface, Zero Dark Thirty seems somewhat clinical and lacks a lot of heart. Then again playful scenes or normal plot devices that we are used to seeing in a Hollywood film would have seemed out of place with the subject matter that ZDT is dealing with. Instead what we get is an all access, behind the scenes look at the people who worked a decade to find Bin Laden. The film doesn't pull any punches showing us some of the tactics used to get the job done. To tell the story any differently would have been a disservice.
The end of the film is very satisfying. To see Bin Laden taken down felt like closure to something that had been lingering for a very long time. To know that a woman played such an instrumental role in catching Osama Bin Laden makes it that much sweeter. Generations from now, when people are looking for a movie to tell the story of how Bin Laden was caught, they will find Zero Dark Thirty.