Thriller tartare

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2013)

The hunt for Osama bin Laden was an excruciating one, especially by American government agencies. Countless people, both at home and abroad, lost their lives and time fighting and searching for the man, and in a small town in Pakistan, 2011, the search came to a blistering end.
Kathryn Bigelow's docudrama "Zero Dark Thirty" recreates the tense events leading up to that day. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal sidesteps the drama and goes straight for the jugular, a controversial decision given the attention by the masses towards the plot material.
I am not here to divulge into political issues that may or may not have been brought up in the film. I am merely judging the film in terms of its craftsmanship as a thriller. And to that, I say, Bigelow has crafted a superb thriller; raw in suspense and crackling with tension and paranoia, not unlike "The Hurt Locker".
This is not an action movie although there are good scenes which suggest it. Bigelow sheds the genre conventions down to basics to show the journey without any delay. The film is, stripped-to-the-bone, a thriller set on a slow burn, opening with brutal torture scenes, followed by investigative/procedural dramatics for the first half. In the second half, Bigelow purposely left the stove running to a boil, culminating in a surprisingly nail-biting climax.
Characters come and go as the plot requires it, but Jessica Chastain's character remains the core of this movie, as she determinedly buries herself in her job to capture the most notorious man on Earth. At the end of it all, you might be putting yourself in her shoes: is it all worth it?