"I'm the motherfucker who found this place."
“I’m the motherfucker who found this place.”

 

As a medium, film has an amazing capacity to remind us of who we were.

We watch as events from our past for better and for worse shaped us as a society. Sometimes we see more innocent times, other times we relive terrible misjudgments. The audience watches from arm’s reach, believing that lessons from our past can guide us through our present. Sometimes though, a film dares to deny its audience that buffer – instead forcing them to confront what’s going on in the world right that very moment…for better and for worse.

In short, every once in a while, a film comes along and finds a way to remind us of who we are, and ZERO DARK THIRTY is that sort of film.

ZERO DARK THIRTY begins in 2003 with a C.I.A. operative named Maya (Jessica Chastain) arriving in Pakistan to aid in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. She is partnered up with an operative named Dan (Jason Clarke) and put under the supervision of Station Chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler). In 2003, the directive was clear: interrogate all captured Al Qaeda operatives to get whatever information possible on the plans and whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden. As we see when Maya arrives, the rules about what is and is not acceptable interrogation are being bent, broken, or completely ignored.

Maya’s team finds a measure of success and is given the name Abu Ahmed. They are told that he is the personal courier for Osama Bin Laden. Maya believes that he is the key to finding Bin Laden and fixates on getting his whereabouts. Months turn to years, and he cannot be found. Worse yet, further interrogations lead to the belief that the man they are chasing is long since dead, meaning the C.I.A. has been chasing a ghost.

Eventually, Maya gets lucky and discovers a lead on Ahmed’s true identity. Surveillance leads her to cell phone calls made from Pakistan. Further surveillance leads her to a massive suburban compound in Abbottabad.

After nine years, thousands of man hours, and scores of lost lives, Maya believes she might finally be on the right track. The question is, if she is, what will it take to actually make a move?

Seal Team Six
 

What ZERO DARK THIRTY underlines well is how much of The War on Terror was a frustration. It was a frustration for military leaders who were fighting an enemy they couldn’t see. It was a frustration for strategists who saw their resources get misdirected thanks to some bad decisions and policies. It was a frustration for everyone on the home front who endured lie after lie and anxiously waited for some sort of decisive victory. So much of the western world was just as frustrated as Maya got in the second half of the film. We all wanted to yell at the people in charge and scribble obvious details in big red marker to emphasize our point.

What the film wants us to understand is how precious little could be done about that frustration. We weren’t just at the mercy of an enemy playing by a separate set of rules, but we were left to deal with the consequences of some truly terrible choices made in the early going. The entire mission was like building a house thats foundation is one quarter-inch off. By the time you get two or three stories off, that quarter-inch has turned into one foot, and the entire plan needs to go back to the beginning. In the same way, the movie underlines how gunslinging decisions like Gunatanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and “Saddam Hussein absolutely has Weapons of Mass Destruction” set the plan off by whole feet…almost to the point that those building the house could have taken their tools and left.

Instead, people like Maya, George, and Dan played through the frustration. They kept pushing forward – sometimes at a painstaking pace. They were pulled into the fray, got a few lucky breaks, and made the right case to the right people. They recognized all of those early mistakes and never stopped trying to atone for them.

At the same time, ZERO DARK THIRTY doesn’t try to make any excuses. It begins by reminding us what spurred us all into war in the first place, and pulls no punches in what war brought out in us. The Coalition of the Willing, The West, The Allies – whatever you want to call the side that fought Al Qaeda – we tortured. This film doesn’t take a stance on whether that was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, it just says without reservation “we did this”. It must have been tempting to say “Can you believe we did this?” or likewise “We won because we did this”. But no, the film just says “We did this. For better or worse, we did this. It can never be undone, and will forever be debated. But it happened, and that is that.”

Late in the game, the C.I.A. Director asks Maya what else she has worked on for the agency besides the hunt for Bin Laden. Quite matter-of-factly, she tells him “nothing”. It’s that moment, combined with the final shot of the film that makes me fall for Maya and her end of this story. She is not the sort of operative who has been playing whack-a-mole for a decade; capturing a list of targets and almost immediately being handed a new list of targets. She has spent ten whole years working on one thing and one thing only. It has cost her any semblance of a personal life, it has steeled her irrevocably, and when she finally achieves that one thing, she may or may not know what to do next. She has been blunted, steeled, reconditioned, and reprogrammed…so much so, that a moment that should spur satisfaction doesn’t seem to rouse anything close.

That’s what makes ZERO DARK THIRTY such a special film.

It would be easy to make a rah-rah movie about the night America killed its greatest enemy. It would be easy to evoke applause from audiences as Seal Team Six executes its order. The reality though, is that we get through that amazingly executed final act, and like Maya we find ourselves shaken and spent. The movie doesn’t celebrate the mission and doesn’t celebrate the war. It stands up and says “This happened: Now live with it”.
 

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★
What did you think? Please leave comments with your thoughts and reactions on ZERO DARK THIRTY.

11 Replies to “ZERO DARK THIRTY

  1. I’m still not sure how I felt about this film. I agree with what you said about how it presented the story and that I don’t think it was pro or anti anything, but rather just showing the events. What left me cold with the film was the lack of character development. You get bits and pieces, but mostly I kept wondering why I was supposed to care about these characters and their obsession to find Osama just wasn’t enough of a rooting interest for me.

    1. I’m pretty much with you, Marya. The movie wants to be a meticulous procedural, but there’s really not much information to go on in the first half. All we have to see us through are these characters, but they’re so thinly developed, and in some cases so obviously symbolic representations of America as a whole, that it’s difficult to get invested in their goals. The movie tries to take a distant, more detached approach. It remains ambiguous on a lot of moral questions. This could all have been interesting if it was seen through the lens of really great characters, but that just felt missing to me. The film works best during the raid, when it really is just about watching the action play out.

    2. I felt that we were supposed to care because we were watching determination turn into obsession. We watched a person who didn’t have much else going on from the start completely forget about it all by the end.

      When she arrives in Pakistan, she describes what she sees as “pretty fucked up”, but after a very short amount of time, she’s actively participating in what she saw as fucked-up without hesitation.

      We’re supposed to car because people like Maya let professional determination turn into broken obsession…and in so doing lost a whole lot more of themselves and what makes them human and normal.

  2. Great review, pretty much what I think about the film.

    The scene that underlines the movie for me is a very short reaction shot, where we see the look of the children in Bin Laden’s compound right after Bin Laden was shot. This brief shot basically encapsulate the war on terror and more specifically the hunt for Bin Laden. Is it worth it? Does it change anything? What’s the consequence of killing Bin Laden? By laying it out there in the open, the film forces us to look closely and deal with it. If Bigelow takes a stance, it would be a much less interesting movie, closer to a propaganda film.

    This film biggest strength is its singularity. The film is all about the hunt for Bin Laden. Maya’s entire existence in the film is to hunt down Bin Laden. The film isn’t interested in her personal life, and it shouldn’t be. She is her job. I don’t need any made-up melodrama, just her alone is fine.

    1. I won’t soon forget Maya’s face when she hears that the mission was a success. It might be the most human expression we get from Jessica Chastain the entire runtime…and it comes at the only moment it should come.

      You’re right – I feel like making a propaganda film for or against would have been a lot easier. By setting out the story in a more clinical nature, Bigelow allows us to have our own discussions without much commentary of her own to muddy the waters.

  3. I haven’t had a chance to see this yet but I’ve been looking forward to it despite the controversy that’s surrounded it. Glad to hear you liked it so much and that it got you thinking. Great review!

    1. Do give it a go – I’ve heard people come away shrugging their shoulders at what Jessica Chastain does with the part, but I found a lot of subtlety (when she’s not shouting at her superiors).

      I’ll be interested to read your take.

  4. Great review! Your point about the frustration thing is spot on. This film illustrates that perfectly. “Maya gets lucky and discovers a lead on Ahmed’s true identity…” Despite all of that painstaking effort, it really came down to luck isn’t it? They really did take a chance on this whole raid, even Maya who seemed 100% convinced, I’m sure the thought crossed her mind if the intel ended up being false. I’m glad there wasn’t a celebratory response after the final act… that end scene of Maya in the aircraft carrier is exactly what I expect someone in her position would’ve done.

    1. That moment in the plane is intense isn’t it?

      I was quite taken with the abundance of confidence Maya exuded – she’d have to, wouldn’t she? Her job entails her trying to be listened to in what is essentially a boys club, so to get ahead, she sorta has to play up the cockiness a little bit.

      Great film!

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