Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is a taut, tough, tart film that brims with tension and suspense. Promoting it as a thriller has been a bold move, considering we all know the conclusion. But the movie does thrill, because few are familiar with the ins and outs of the ten-year manhunt for al-Qaeda’s leader in this much detail.
Penned
by Mark Boal, the reporter-turned-screenwriter who won an Academy Award for
Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, the movie
is a seamless weave of truth (allegedly based on “first-hand accounts of actual
events”) and drama that hews closely to real-life but takes some poetic
license. Much of the fascination of watching it comes from the gradual
unveiling of facts, the meticulous and comprehensive chronicling of every step
forward, every setback, dead-end and disappointment on the long, slow, arduous
road to bin Laden’s capture on May 2, 2011 at zero dark thirty (military-speak
for half past midnight).
More
than anything else, the film celebrates process, professionalism, and the
perfect mix of deduction, intuition, supposition, screaming matches, and luck
main character Maya (the versatile, ubiquitous, incredible Jessica Chastain)
uses. Like Spielberg’s Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty takes us behind the
scenes of one of the most important events in American history, showcasing the
messy, ethically complicated, strenuous means by which progress is oftentimes achieved.
