Undoubtedly one of the thorniest subjects a filmmaker could tackle in the modern age, the spectre of 9/11 is something that has to be treated with a certain amount of delicacy. That still hasn’t stopped a clutch of Hollywood mavericks trying to make sense of that awful day when 3000 people died after a devestating act of global terrorism, and while Oliver Stone attempted it with World Trade Centre in 2006, Paul Greengrass looked at it from another angle in the same year with United 93.
However, tackling the aftermath proved to present a completely different set of problems and in some cases, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty had something of the most delicate balancing act of all when covering the hunt and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden. Do you rush in, gus blazing and flags flying to get some cathartic payback, or do you try to present a calm, level-headed telling of events that lays out the details of the greatest manhunt in modern history? Thankfully, The Hurt Locker Bigelow rather than Point Break Bigelow showed up to work.
A CIA analyst known only to us as Maya is tasked with tracking down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and finds herself stationed at the US embassy in Pakistan in 2003. Almost immediately, she is required to sit in and witness black site interrogations as colleague Dan Fuller attempts to torture vital information out of a detainee suspected of having links to the 9/11 hijackers and as the harrowing questioning is carried out a slim branch of a lead is discovered. From here, Maya is like a dog with a bone as her near-obsessive search lasts from here until that fateful night 2011, and as she pushes deeper and deeper, she suffers various pushbacks from colleagues, superiors and even al-Qaeda themselves.
As the years tick by and other attacks such as 7/7, the Islamabad Marriott bombing and the incident at Camp Chapman only strengthens Maya’s resolve, especially when the higher ups won’t even consider budging on an operation unless everyone is 110% certain that bin Laden’s location has been verified. However, Maya is 110% certain, especially concerning her newest lead that points to a suspicious looking compound in Abbottabad Pakistan – but even then, the wheels within the CIA turn agonisingly slow for someone so convinced that they’re right.
Eventually the green light is given and members of SEAL Team Six are briefed, loaded into stealth helicopters and sent in to breach the compound in a mission that has massive ramifications for the entire world.
But in the aftermath, after the world has given so much, can one death right a multitude of wrongs, and did a country trade its soul to do it?
Possibly the most admirable thing about Zero Dark Thirty is it’s willingness to get its hands dirty when it comes to some of the more distasteful aspects involving the CIA’s methods in the hunt for bin Laden. It seems that Kathryn Bigelow had set herself a mission statement not to flinch when it came to the more morally murky parts of the story be it the sustained and upsetting torture and humiliation inflicted on a detainee, or the shooting of women during the climactic raid on that compound in Abbottabad. Some have targeted Bigelow’s choice to not pass judgement on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” as an endorsement of the practice of torture, but in her sober, call-it-down the middle mode she’s put herself in, she manages to lay out some cold, hard facts. If the CIA was allowed to do it, then do it they did and while it does give them actionable intelligence and the operatives act like a valuable resource has been lost to them once Obama publicly stood against the use of torture, Bigelow also doesn’t shy away from how fucking distasteful and dehumanising it is.
In fact, she spends almost the entire first third of the movie on it, forcing us to be both horrified and pragmatic as our “heroes” abuse and dehumanise their prisoners almost immediately after we first meet them, but even beyond our time spent at a black site, Bigelow is determined to make us feel every inch of this journey. Be it the tension felt when the film casts it’s eye of the terrorist atrocities inflicted on the world after 9/11, to the maddening grind of being a CIA analyst during such turbulent times, part and parcel of the Zero Dark Thirty experience is burying you in red tape, waiting and making you feel every second of that weighty 157 minute run time.
As a result, some may find the alternating harrowing/tense/boring aspects of the film a bit too much to get on board with, but like it or not, you have to give the film credit for make you feel every bit of its winding journey. Bigelow eventually “pays off” the wait with a breathtaking sequence that details the events of that final mission and the fact that it’s so warts and all (helicopter crashes, doors that won’t breach, bin Laden is shot almost as an after thought), it proves to be utterly gripping despite the fact we know exactly what is going to happen.
The sprawling cast are more than up for the challenge with a resolute Jessica Chastain proving to be something of the perfect choice for a Bigelow protagonist, relishing spitting out dialogue like “I’m the motherfucker that found him.” and “100% he’s there. OK, 95%, ’cause I know certainty freaks you guys out, but it’s 100.” with a delivery that doesn’t veer into self parody. She’s surrounded by a sprawling and varied cast who provide a vast ensemble who pop in and out of the film without warning who all add to the gravitas of the piece – I mean, where else could you find a cast list that contains Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini, Scott Adkins and – for some reason – John Barrowman all in the same film.
However, for all of its virtues, some simply just won’t gel with it politically speaking and despite it’s claims of realism, a sizable amount of the film has been pared down and simplified for consumption (there was no Maya, for example). Similarly, for all of its dramatic weight, it isn’t a patch on what Bigelow managed to achieve with The Hurt Locker, which balances the tension and danger with noticably better skill – but controversy concerning accusations that it heightened the importance of torture more than it should, Zero Dark Thirty proves to be a fittingly gruelling watch for various reasons.
Wisely forgoing flag waving and knee-jerk patriotism in favor of deeply uncomfortable acts of global intelligence, Zero Dark Thirty strives to call things down the middle without being middle of the road. From its challenging opening scenes to an ending that asks “what now” once the world’s most wanted man is finally brought down, it refuses to glorify anything while giving Chastain another chance to shine.
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