About The Movie:
For a decade, an elite team of
intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe,
devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden.
Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar® winning team of director-producer Kathryn
Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of
history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man.
What Is Good/Bad About The Movie:
The scene you may be expecting from Zero Dark Thirty comes at the very end of the nearly three-hour film, as director Kathryn Bigelow precisely recreated the raid on the house in Pakistan that led to the Navy SEAL team assassinating Osama bin Laden. It's a spectacularly tense and realistic scene, full of the same adrenaline you remember from Bigelow's Point Break and The Hurt Locker, and suffused with both films' sense of male camaraderie and macho strength.
But the two hours that come before
that tell a very different story, with a woman--Jessica Chastain's Maya--at the
center and a much different kind of drive that led to finding bin Laden. The
10-year manhunt, including setbacks like the 2005 London bombings and several
CIA deaths, is recreated in unbelievable detail, with screenwriter Mark Boal's
journalist's eye cannily setting up the major and minor players who led to that
dramatic SEAL Team Six raid. And before we even meet Maya or any other agents,
Bigelow bombards us with an audio recreation of 9/11, using phone calls made
from inside the World Trade Center; it's a harrowing and unforgettable scene,
setting up the incredible stakes for finding bin Laden, and plunging us
immediately into that post-9/11 atmosphere of fear and lust for revenge.
Maya embodies both of things
perfectly, though it takes a while to see it; we first meet her as a silent,
shocked witness to a CIA agent (Jason Clarke) as he tortures an al-Qaeda
detainee, derisively calling him "bro" and promising "If you lie
to me, I will hurt you." With her delicate features and flowing red hair
Maya looks out of place in the dingy torture chamber, but she knows what she's
doing; when the detainee begs her for mercy, she refuses, setting the tone for
her tough and unrelenting character as well as the movie's attitude toward
torture. Bigelow shoots the torture scenes in grim, uncomfortable detail, but
she also allows that such intense interrogation leads to a key piece of
information that helps Maya hunt down bin Laden. Though Zero Dark Thirty deals
with incredibly politicized topics, its only bias is toward the devoted CIA
agents who were willing to do absolutely anything to find their man.
Though embedded deeply in the dirty
and sometimes dull work of the CIA, from tapping phones to bribing sources and,
yes, torturing them, Zero Dark Thirty's winding story dovetails occasionally
with more famous history-- a brief sequence of the 2005 London bombings is
unbearably tense, and protests in Pakistan surrounding U.S. drone strikes
affect one character we've come to like without even knowing his name. For
anyone with only a passing knowledge of modern CIA history, though, there are
plenty of surprises, from the details of how we found bin Laden's hideout to a
few moments of explosive violence that, to me at least, came as a complete
surprise. The film moves at a methodical, professional pace as Maya conducts her
investigations, but in the occasional pops of suspense Bigelow's action
directing skills truly shine.
It's frankly incredible that, in the middle of such a complicated story, Zero Dark Thirty presents such a complex character in Maya, a tough woman in an impossible job who sidesteps every imaginable possible cliche. Everything about her, from the way she wears a scarf over her head when interrogating a detainee to the false smiles she gives to put powerful men at ease, speaks to her unusual position as a woman in the Middle East, but that contrast never becomes text, just another fascinating layer in a story with no simple conclusions. Not all of the characters around her are equally as complex-- Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau and Joel Edgerton are just a few of the big names who are gone as soon as they arrive-- but Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini and especially Clarke all make their impact, though all somewhat overshadowed by the powerhouse that is Chastian. Like the woman at its center, Zero Dark Thirty exudes a constant, quiet confidence, telling a story with an ending we all know and making it feel thrilling, suspenseful, and completely vital.
It's frankly incredible that, in the middle of such a complicated story, Zero Dark Thirty presents such a complex character in Maya, a tough woman in an impossible job who sidesteps every imaginable possible cliche. Everything about her, from the way she wears a scarf over her head when interrogating a detainee to the false smiles she gives to put powerful men at ease, speaks to her unusual position as a woman in the Middle East, but that contrast never becomes text, just another fascinating layer in a story with no simple conclusions. Not all of the characters around her are equally as complex-- Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau and Joel Edgerton are just a few of the big names who are gone as soon as they arrive-- but Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini and especially Clarke all make their impact, though all somewhat overshadowed by the powerhouse that is Chastian. Like the woman at its center, Zero Dark Thirty exudes a constant, quiet confidence, telling a story with an ending we all know and making it feel thrilling, suspenseful, and completely vital.
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