Zero Dark Thirty Review
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrinau, Joel Edgerton, Mark Duplass and James Gandolfini
Kathryn Bigelow’s latest drama chronicling the (true?) story of the behind-the-scenes hunt for Osama bin Laden has amassed both critical accolades and controversy. Zero Dark Thirty is irrefutably a top-notch suspense drama, but your enjoyment of the film will lie greatly in your ability to mentally navigate through a quagmire of details, names and locations before the film’s third act climax. The necessity of so much information stuffed into a nearly three hour run time makes for a challenging viewing. Thirty is ambitious, if not ostentatious, but the ultimate payout is worth the frustration, and the final thirty minutes consists of one of the most suspenseful action sequences of 2012, all the more chilling because it is based on true events.
The opening scenes of Thirty jump right into the fray following the events of 9/11, as CIA operative Dan (Jason Clarke) interrogates a suspect using the controversial “by any means necessary” school of thought. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation and various other means of coercion are rotated on a daily basis, until his assigned subject starts to waver mentally and physically. A fresh-scrubbed CIA ingénue (Maya, played by Jessica Chastain) straight off the plane from DC looks on with horror, revulsion and sympathy while these events unfold.
A decade later, Maya’s soft façade has been peeled away by years of frustration and heartache, and she will become the one calling for questionable interrogation techniques. Though there are definite undertones of political posturing regarding the United States and its use of torture during the days after 9/11, that’s not what Thirty is really about. Those early scenes serve as a contrast as to how Maya’s character evolves and hardens over years of tracking down Osama bin Laden.
Maya’s obsessive drive leads to her crapshoot theory that the best way to find bin Laden is to actually track down his personal courier, who will inadvertently lead them to their number one target. This theory doesn’t sit well with the suits in Washington, but Maya sticks to her guns until bin Laden is ultimately killed in his compound in May of 2011. Over the course of ten years, numerous CIA operatives are killed in terrorist attacks around the globe, many of them Maya’s close friends, so the hunt becomes exponentially more personal for her.
Thirty is excruciatingly detailed. Doubtless you’ve read about some government leaders up in arms about the film because they feel Bigelow may have gotten too much inside information (then again, some of them are dismissing the film as pure rubbish). Like most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. While no one can disparage Bigelow for providing so many facts in her film, the second hour becomes hard to follow. Most of the names are foreign and similar sounding, many characters wear turbans, so they are hard to physically differentiate, and Bigelow rarely uses subtitles. The result is feeling a bit lost, but perhaps that is Bigelow’s intent. She threw us straight into the chaos of war in The Hurt Locker; here we can be tossed about in the frenzied urgency of trying to track down bin Laden.
Once you make it through that initial hump, the final third ratchets up the suspense as a team of special ops make their final descent into bin Laden’s reputed compound. Night vision goggles cast an eerie post-apocalyptic pall over the scenes, which could easily be mistaken for a sequence out of a horror film. They’re creepy as hell. Cinematographer Greig Fraser has dabbled in dark material before (Let Me In, Snow White and the Huntsman) and is well-suited to the material. Thankfully, Bigelow ends the movie after the mission. Most filmmakers would have tacked on an epilogue or provided real-life news footage, and Bigelow was wise not to do so. The film ends on a somber, abrupt note, as it should.
Chastain’s buzz (and Golden Globe win) is richly deserved. She is electrifying in the film. A fiery monologue delivered mid-film garnered cheers from my audience. Her mental and physical transformation during the course of the film is remarkable; by the end she is gaunt and hollow-eyed, exhausted by years of futile pursuit. Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrinau, Joel Edgerton and Mark Duplass are strong supporting players, and James Gandolfini provides some unexpected laughs as a crotchety CIA boss.
Overall, Bigelow has done a superb job of bringing a politically-charged story to the screen with as little fanfare as possible. You won’t be waving your flag as the credits roll, but you won’t be hanging your head in shame, either. It’s a fair presentation of a manhunt the likes of which we all hope will never transpire again. – Shannon
Comments (24)
“many characters wear turbans, so they are hard to physically differentiate,”
Nice, thank you for clearing up your xenophobic attitude.
Posted by Johnny on January 15th, 2013I’m not surprised that you would give it 4 stars, but this film is disgraceful! Bigelow and her clearly pro-America (just because it’s not a typical Republican-type chanter, it doesn’t mean it isn’t pro-USA) approach in her films is disgusting to watch. Like Tara McKelvey said it: “The Hurt Locker is one of the most effective recruiting vehicles for the U.S. Army that I have seen.” This piece of propaganda, although quite austere in that regard, is no different. The assassination of Osama bin Laden was a vile and cruel act, and was the culmination of the United States illegally and violently (and very often through terrorism, — which comes as no surprise, as the United States is the foremost sponsor and participant of terrorism in the world) killing hundreds of thousands of people and completely ruining two countries.
“There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.”
How about you made your film about that, Bigelow? No, instead you take a subject that is clearly pointing towards your country being the “bad-guy”. So what you do is you “objectify” the topic to take away the elements of your country being bad. And at the end of the day we are following an American character with emotional problems, hunting one-dimensional Muslims — and it becomes something ala Homeland. So “we” (the US) end up being the good guys, and “they” (Muslims, Russian, Chinese or whoever happens to inherit the enemy-role) become the bad guys.
It’s kind of like Spielberg’s Munich (although that film is 100 times better than anything Bigelow has made). What Zizek says about it fits perfectly for both of Bigelow’s films:
” In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this “honest” acknowledgment of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines. Therein resides the lie of Spielberg’s Munich: it wants to be “objective,” presenting moral complexity and ambiguity, psychological doubts, the problematic nature of revenge, of the Israeli perspective, but what its “realism” does is redeem the Mossad agents still further: “look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts- they have doubts, whereas the Palestinian terrorists…” One cannot but sympathize with the hostility with which the surviving Mossad agents who really carried out the revenge killings reacted to the film (“there were no psychological doubts, we just did what we had to do”) for there is much more honesty in their stance.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this film won its Oscar-nominations. After all, Homeland — despite being pretty mediocre/bad as a drama series — won its Golden Globe nominations, over great television series like Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad (which gave us one the best seasons in a television series ever). This film, dramatizing and silently commemorating the disgusting act of the illegal assassination of bin Laden, and even taking a pro-torture stance — which our dear reviewer, Shannon, so cunningly avoids confronting — will no doubt be a favorite to win the awards.
This film shouldn’t be avoided. In fact, I recommend people to see it as a lesson of modern propaganda, just like someone in the 1940′s would see Casablanca as a contemporary propaganda-film.
Posted by La Menthe on January 15th, 2013Johnny Zizek clearly hasn’t actually seen Munich. And it appears Le Mentos hasn’t seen ZD30. Or its sequel, UB40.
Posted by Nat Almirall on January 15th, 2013@Johnny I knew I would risk sounding that way, but I am not a xenophobe. I am not referring to the scenes where people are stationary, I am talking about action scenes where people are running through the market or city, and are covered from head to toe with clothing. Forgive me for not having x-ray vision. I was only trying to make a point. It would be the same as if a film took place in Antartica, and everyone wore snow-suits, parkas, and goggles. I still can’t tell who anyone is.
Posted by Shannon on January 15th, 2013@ La Menthe. This is a film review, not a political editorial piece. obviously I am not a person qualified to write political commentary, or I would be doing so.
Posted by Shannon on January 15th, 2013@Shannon
That’s not good enough. I’m commenting the film’s content, and almost all films are, as an art form, political in one way or the other (this of course depends on what would go under your definition of “politics”). And ZD30 is far more political than the usual film. Even you yourself referred to the story as “politically-charged”.
Avoiding the political aspects of ZD30 is the same thing as avoiding the main themes of the film. By ignoring these aspects, your review becomes empty and void. It would be like disregarding the political aspects of Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will.
Posted by La Menthe on January 15th, 2013@Nat
I’m beginning to wonder myself whether you have seen it? I have seen Munich up to 10 times (most recently last week), and Slavoj Zizek’s dissection couldn’t be more right. I find it funny how you discount one of the most influential political thinkers of our time — who also is quite prominent in film theory, having written many books dedicated to it.
Posted by La Menthe on January 15th, 2013I thought the movie lacked character especially in the Chastain dept. Jason Clarke’s character was given more background and psychology than Chastain and he was only in the first 30 mins of the movie. Didn’t feel like we were getting into the psychology of her character like Bigelow did with Hurt Locker and Jeremy Renner.
Felt this one was a bit off. Could have done without the 30 mins of torture for a character that wasn’t going to really have much of an impact later on and put those extra 30 mins into Chastain.
More of a play by play than a character driven drama.
Posted by darksiders on January 15th, 2013@La Menthe I’m fine with you calling it empty and void. Quite frankly I didn’t want to write the review, I had a hard time doing so because I knew I lacked the cerebral capacity to handle the political material. I’m just someone who likes movies, and I should have skipped this one, but if I attend a screening, I am obligated to write a review. Sorry this one does not please.
Posted by Shannon on January 15th, 2013@LaMenthe
Hey lay off Shannon and lay off of people..this is forum for polite discussions involving films of all types not a forum for attacking accusations and scathing critical abuse.
If you got an opinion fine, but lay off of the attacks.
Shannon wrote a review on what SHE SAW and INFERRED from the movie. So you either agree with it or not but don’t accuse her of writing something that you would have written.
If she missed something that you felt should have been addressed fine, but don’t go off on some diatribe that belittles the contribution she makes to this site.
I find you rude, obnoxious, and belittling to others that do not reflect your ideals…take a chill pill and direct your fight at institutions which need change not at people who come here to enjoy films and the criticisms that go along with them.
Oh that’s all in IMO.
Posted by 1138sw on January 15th, 2013I don’t see anything wrong with Shannon’s take on the film. I think the movie is only as political as you want to make it.
Posted by Sean on January 15th, 2013@ Okay. Then I’m sorry for being aggressive, as you don’t seem to have wanted to be in the position you are in. All of my anger stems from the film itself, and I guess I was infuriated by the fact that you gave it 4 out of 4 stars.
@Sean, let’s not start this discussion again, please. This film isn’t “as political as you want to make it.” It IS political. The topic it is based on is political. The political climate it is based on, and that we are in today, makes it political. the story is political. The characters are carrying out acts of political weight, and are driven by a political goal. You couldn’t find many films from the previous year, aside from documentaries, that were more political than ZD30. To disregard the film’s political significance is to disregard the film itself.
Posted by La Menthe on January 15th, 2013>>”Hey lay off Shannon and lay off of people..this is forum for polite discussions involving films of all types not a forum for attacking accusations and scathing critical abuse.”
That’s bullshit, and you know it. In the Zack Snyder discussion, I wrote politely and stayed away from any personal attacks (I have done that here too, as my anger was directed towards the review, and not Shannon herself), and even requested a more reasonable debate. You yourself were there, and you saw how a few of the users attacked me as a person, rather than focusing on the discussion. And just yesterday, under the “Star Wars Snyder”-article, someone made an assumption that I was a “crack addict”, a post that was later supported by one of Filmjunk’s most active users, Deven Science.
So don’t go around educating me about “polite discussions”.
>>”If she missed something that you felt should have been addressed fine, but don’t go off on some diatribe that belittles the contribution she makes to this site”.
I was critical of her review, and I still am. But I don’t see how you managed to interpret that as me being demeaning towards the contribution she makes to the site. How did you even manage to turn this into “the contribution she makes to this site”!? It’s completely beside the point.
Posted by La Menthe on January 15th, 2013“@Sean, let’s not start this discussion again, please.”
Okay.
Posted by Sean on January 15th, 2013So basically you’re saying the film is political because it doesn’t overtly address politics. Regardless of whether you agree with that assessment or not, I don’t see how you can attack a review for also not addressing the film’s lack of a political platform, or at least not affirming your own views.
Posted by Nat Almirall on January 15th, 2013Just wanted to say I enjoyed your review, and I agree with your view of the film. You shouldn’t let one person’s misguided opinion stop you from writing these reviews.
As for La Menthe, you seem to have missed the entire point of the film. Never is America made out to be good guys. Never does the film become jingoistic. We are shown the acts of torture in a visceral and off putting way, they are ugly. The film isn’t taking a side, it is merely showing us. The final frame of the film represents the moral quandary America is currently faced with. Where do we go now? Was it worth it?
Furthermore, if these characters were being painted like heroes they wouldn’t be making off putting remarks in celebration of their kills. Bigelow puts crying children in that raid scene for a reason, because she doesn’t want this murder to be a ra ra victory. She never lets the audience out of this easily. We can’t celebrate this accomplishment because we were forced to see the ugly way we got here, we can’t celebrate because we hear small children crying, we can’t celebrate because the soldiers carrying out the act seem to think this is some sort of FPS.
You seem to be the one with an agenda. You view Americans in a certain way and you are bringing your baggage into the film, and I’m sorry it effected your viewing so much.
Posted by Essie on January 16th, 2013@16 — I don’t think at ALL that the soldiers carrying out the act seemed to think it was like a video game. That just sounds really, REALLY dumb. They were just super good at their job, it’s why THEY were there, and while they were going after one of the biggest targets in history, it still seemed like a fairly normal thing for them to be doing. However, don’t you think YOU’D geek out for even a second if you found out that YOU had been the one to put a bullet in the most wanted man in the world? No matter how calm and collected I would have been up to that point, I’d still be like the guy who was saying “Holy shit, do you know what you just did, dude?”.
Posted by PlanBFromOuterSpace on January 16th, 2013These are the interesting moral questions the film asks. My answer would be no, I don’t believe I would act that way.
Posted by Essie on January 16th, 2013@Nat
Where did I say it was political because it didn’t overtly address politics?
@Essie
That’s not the impression the film left me. To me it was politically biased exactly in the same way as The Hurt Locker; as mentioned earlier, the characters from our side demonstrate all the typical “rational” psychological complexities. But this recognition of our own shadowy side stands for the very opposite, for the hidden contention of our superiority: we are psychologically multifaceted, full of uncertainties, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines. By wanting to be objective, and presenting the problematic nature of revenge, moral and complex ambiguity, it redeems our characters carrying out the actions they are committing.
And the film, just like The Hurt Locker, avoids a ton of questions and problems (that I mentioned earlier in my first post); did it for example delve into the fact that these people were illegally assassinating a man that they could easily bring in alive? No. Instead, it deals with “how we get there”, so that there is no mention of the fact that the assassination was both morally and legally repulsive.
And I disagree with you on the question of torture. Yes, it’s right, it doesn’t depict torture in a good way. But then again, who can, or who does? What sympathizers of the use of torture argue (all the way from Western right-wing intellectuals to the Nazi-regime), is that it is a “necessary-evil”. So the argument is “Yes it’s brutal. Yes, it’s inhumane. But it is necessary for us to do to get us where we want.” And that is exactly how this film depicts it. The torture is filthy, and hideous, but in the end it helps them reaching their goal (like Frank Bruni concluded it, “No waterboarding, no bin Laden”). The torture is given a constructive function, and it is also depicted as a necessary act to protect the US.
>>” You seem to be the one with an agenda. You view Americans in a certain way and you are bringing your baggage into the film, and I’m sorry it effected your viewing so much.”
I’m not alone here. Even Mass-media newspapers like The Guardian have depicted the film as “pernicious propaganda”, and has come to the same conclusion of its depiction of torture as I did. The Atlantic described the film “represents a troubling new frontier of government-embedded filmmaking.”
And I view it impossible to not “bring your baggage into the film”, as this film is blatantly political. You have to be subjective about films, and in a overtly political film as this one, your opinion of it would not just include the purely technical elements, but also the thematic and political views of the film. Just like someone called this film a ” stylistic masterwork”, I would refer to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Triump of the will” as a stylistic masterwork. But reviewing the film from simply the technical aspect, and not analyze it from the film’s thematic/political platform (what does the film try to tell us, and so on and so forth), gives a harmful depiction of the film. I have a strong belief in viewing film as art, and therefore being meant to depict us certain ideas and values. To avoid this area, to avoid the film’s idea of making an opinion — and especially in a film like this one — about issues of our time, it becomes nothing more than an empty piece of moving images.
Posted by La Menthe on January 16th, 2013That Guardian piece was written before the writer saw the film which makes it completely worthless.
Posted by Essie on January 16th, 2013Not it isn’t. Greenwald wrote two pieces; one being before the film was released, where he predicted the film’s content; the other where he actually saw the film and reviewed it. It’s the latter piece I quoted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
Posted by La Menthe on January 16th, 2013“How about you made your film about that, Bigelow? No, instead you take a subject that is clearly pointing towards your country being the “bad-guy”. So what you do is you “objectify” the topic to take away the elements of your country being bad.”
That’s an assumption that Bigelow’s doing it intentionally, and it’s a pretty big one. In any event, you seem to be arguing that the film is political largely because it ignores politics.
Posted by Nat Almirall on January 17th, 2013Intentionally or not, it has been done under her name in her film. And as you can remember, I called this a propaganda-piece, and propaganda and biased views generally have a key function of not focusing on certain things, in order to avoid ruining the view that is presented. That isn’t the same as not being political. It means that it is politically biased.
Posted by La Menthe on January 18th, 2013@La Menthe, I for one did not leave the film thinking it was pro-American, or pro-torture. The torture scenes sickened me and made me despise the torturers throughout the film. I do think the Zizek quote is relavent but it’s also interested that Maya is barely developed. Her obsession with the quest does not seem entirely healthy. Her torturing colleague was barely humanized either (perhaps only when his monkey’s are killed, which is an odd moment that both leads one to see the humanity of a man introduced as a brutal torturer and dislike the army grunts who assumedly killed the monkeys).
Also, films have a way of having lives that their directors did not foresee. Anti-war films like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July are watched by soldiers to get pumped before battle, films like Wall Street convince young men to become stock brokers, etc.
While I partially agree that Bigelow should have gone farther in her condemnation of torture, I think there is a more open reading of the film where it’s about the moral consequences of the war on terror: destroying two countries, killing hundreds of thousands, torturing thousands, and all supposedly to kill some old man. I think while there was a certain triumph to seeing Bin Laden shot, it was hard not to feel an inkling of the futility and idiocy of the entire project.
Posted by FredMerz on January 20th, 2013Leave a Reply