Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal hit an all-time high a few years ago when they collaborated on the hit film The Hurt Locker, which also just happened to be an actually great movie. Here they are together again with Zero Dark Thirty, which is even more popular than their other movie, even though it doesn’t reach quite the same level of greatness as its predecessor. It tells a mostly made-up story about a CIA operative named Maya who is a very determined and gutsy woman. She follows her intuition and ultimately (Spoiler Alert!) has a big hand in finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

I think the reason this movie is such a smash hit is because it hides itself well. For a nearly three-hour picture there isn’t much of a story here. There are lots of conversation scenes full of military jargon, which you can only assume are intelligent, and these are joined by sporadic moments of genuine intensity. The movie functions as an extended montage of domino effect events that covers a period of over a decade. It all plays out like a mystery story without clues and in which you are told who did it at the very start. For this reason, I found it difficult to invest myself in it. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. On the contrary, Bigelow’s timing is perfect and many sections of the film are truly powerful. It is an easy movie to watch and enjoy, but if you think about it for half a minute, it starts to become illogical.

Much has been said about Jessica Chastain in her first big starring role. After the dozen or so wonderful performances she gave in 2011, it is only fair that she is getting some real recognition. She is great as Maya, a rather vague, one-sided character (like all the others in the movie) that becomes interesting and likeable in Chastain’s hands. Maya is essentially a symbol of strong femininity and I believe Chastain is responsible for providing what little emotion I experienced during the film (I did, however, think the final scene was desperate to the point of silliness, but whatever.).

Zero Dark Thirty is a hard movie to judge. On a purely technical level, it is a grand achievement. Appropriately manipulative and fast-paced, the movie never fails to hold our interest, even when it has no good reason to. The well-paced editing of the film is really the primary reason for its success as entertainment. The same screenplay in a different movie would have been impossible to sit through. That’s where my impatience begins, since I usually don’t care for a movie that makes me feel nothing. The climax was particularly disappointing, since the entire film builds up to it. Half an hour of nameless soldiers running around in the dark followed by a camera so shaky you can hardly tell what’s going on doesn’t feel like a triumphant conclusion. Then again, what was I supposed to feel like? The movie is intentionally distant and matter-of-fact. If I still mostly enjoyed watching it anyway, there’s no real reason to complain.

8/10