A gripping first-draft of history

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2013)

A CIA analyst played by a pretty, pale-skinned actress, tracks a terrorist mastermind. She has an obscure theory that could crack the case but no one else seems to believe her. Her mentor is a more experienced analyst with a scruffy beard. No, I'm not describing the Showtime series, "Homeland." It's the new real-life thriller "Zero Dark Thirty," about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Seldom before has there been a docudrama such as this that can be truly described as "action-packed." It's hard to believe a movie based on true events can have as many explosions as your average Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal demonstrate how ten years worth of chases, shoot-outs and bombings represented twists and turns on the path to finding the leader of al Qaeda. Every good action movie ends with the heroes storming the villain's lair. This one is no exception, but instead of a Death Star or a hollowed out volcano – it's a house in Abbottabad.
Bigelow stages the final assault on bin Laden's compound in near-real time. We all know the outcome and exactly how the scene will play out. But the fact Bigelow can still manage to make the sequence tense and riveting is a true testament to her skill as a filmmaker. The quiet precision of Seal Team Six is shot in large part with a "night vision" look. We feel like we're one of the soldiers on the ground. (The style also reminded me of the finale of "Silence of the Lambs." In the glowing, green dark -- bin Laden's compound is as scary a place as Buffalo Bill's house.) Boal and Bigelow take a detached, journalistic approach to dramatizing the events that lead up to the moment. The most controversial of those events, is the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on a number of detainees. The movie doesn't hold back in showing the how these prisoners were treated. But it leaves it up to the audience to decide if that treatment was justifiable. Elsewhere in the movie, important information is divulged through normal interrogations of men who had been previously been forced to submit to those enhanced techniques. Do the men decide to talk in these circumstances because normal interrogations work better, or because they're afraid they'll be waterboarded again if they don't provide answers? This movie doesn't try to solve that puzzle – perhaps no one can.
"Zero Dark Thirty" is a thoroughly researched, well-executed first draft of history that also happens to work completely as a Hollywood thriller. On September 11th, 2001 – many said that it felt like we were suddenly in a movie. "Zero Dark Thirty" is that film, and now, we know how it ends. The question is, what comes next?