Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Certified: 16
Duration: 157 minutes
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Taylor Kinney, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Duplass, James Gandolfini
KRS release
Zero Dark Thirty focuses on Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA analyst just two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She is assisting agent Dan (Jason Clarke) in the interrogation of a terrorist, who is believed to have very tight connections with Osama bin Laden.
The interrogation is heavy and also includes torture but this gets them another name: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The years go by and Maya remains concentrated on following her lead as terrorism remains on the hoof.
She is not alone in her task: agents Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) and Jack (Harold Perrineau) join in the search while Joseph (Kyle Chandler) is not always much of a help.
Meanwhile, suspicions grow that Bin Laden may be hidden behind a walled compound in Pakistan. Maya has a Navy Seal team ready. Now she must convince the powers that be that the intelligence she has gathered and all her efforts over all these years are worth pursuing.
Director Kathryn Bigelow has always delivered hard-hitting and controversial films – such as classic vampire road movie Near Dark (1987), thriller Point Break (1991), and the study of the military at war in The Hurt Locker (2009).
She directs films that are not associated with stereotypical feminine films and, in fact, she is the only woman to win the best director Academy Award.
The film mixes American foreign policy, CIA methods and transgender politics with ease. It enters the story with an obsessive zeal in the same manner that the protagonist follows her mission.
Chastain is admirable in her depiction of Maya whose life, both professional and personal, is turned around on her obsession. This is carried over from the first half of the film which depicts the breaking down of the manhunt for Bin Laden into the second half which goes off on the actual mission. Bin Laden becomes more than a man or a terrorist as he turns into a veritable personification of the evil that lies in this world.
Watching the scenes of interrogation through Chastain’s eyes reveals the hardness that lies under what looks to be a very vulnerable exterior.
The atmosphere is taut and the film will have you itching to go into action. And when all is said and done – as Bigelow demonstrates in a climax that goes off with almost military-like precision – the director delivers an almost anticlimax closing that seems to cry out in anguish that the evil in this world has, after all, still not been extinguished.