Zero Dark Thirty: Movie Review... First of all, Merry Christmas everyone! Just thought I'd finally post my review of Kathryn Bigelow's latest action thriller...which I watched at ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood last Friday. Just as a recap that I'm sure 99% of you don't need (otherwise you wouldn't have visited my webpage in the first place), Zero Dark Thirty revolves around the decade-long manhunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that culminated in his death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs more than a year ago. Controversy has recently arisen around the torture scenes that are prominently featured in Bigelow's new flick, voiced primarily by folks in Washington and those who actually work in Langley, Virginia (at CIA Headquarters). Hubbub aside, Zero Dark Thirty is an intense film—showing the frustration and ultimately vindication that folks looking for bin Laden felt when the code word for his death was finally radioed from bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan on the night of May 1, 2011: "Geronimo."
Zero Dark Thirty revolves around a real-life CIA operative who in this film goes by the name of Maya. Determinedly portrayed by Jessica Chastain (who I last saw in this September's gangster drama, Lawless), Maya originally begins this flick standing on the sideline as Dan, another operative played by Jason Clarke, is the one responsible for "questioning" detainees held at a CIA black site in Pakistan. Maya apparently has no qualms about the use of waterboarding, dog leashes and other methods that Dan utilizes to get information about bin Laden from this detainee...whose name in this movie is Ammar (played by Reda Kateb). Despite all the brutal and degrading situations that Dan puts him through, Ammar is resilient in not divulging any crucial info about bin Laden or even the next terrorist attack being planned. In fact, the attack goes as expected; with dozens of people killed in a housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia in May of 2004. It is after this massacre that Maya devises a scheme: to lie to Ammar and let him know that the names that he revealed (which he didn't actually do) during his interrogation resulted in numerous lives being saved at Khobar. Ammar had been sleep-deprived for 96 hours, and adding in the fact that he had no contact with the outside world whatsoever allowed Maya and Dan to fool Ammar into thinking that he began to cooperate with them over the course of his captivity. It was through Maya's tactic that the name of the courier, Abu Ahmed—who would ultimately lead to bin Laden's location—was revealed.
The remainder of the film before SEAL Team 6's raid in Abbottabad is about Maya and her CIA team pursuing every lead for the courier's whereabouts in Pakistan. Their investigation takes Maya to a CIA black site in Poland, with Dan visiting a contact (and even buying a Lamborghini for the guy to get his cooperation) in Kuwait who knows Abu Ahmed's mother. (The courier was Kuwaiti.) The search for Ahmed is not without its casualties though, with Maya's close friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) being one of the victims of a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009. With other CIA colleagues having to withdraw from Pakistan due to outrage over civilian deaths caused by unmanned drone strikes (one colleague who was expelled being Joseph Bradley, played by Kyle Chandler), Maya slowly realizes that she is the only one left to continue the search for the courier and ultimately, his boss who was the mastermind for the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Zero Dark Thirty starts to get really intense once Maya and her colleagues finally locate the courier and his/bin Laden's home in Pakistan. The set crew who built a replica of bin Laden's compound (in the country of Jordan, where much of the flick was shot) for the film did a tremendous job making the fortress-like lair look exactly like the one that was featured on almost every newspaper and news website in the days following May 1, 2011. What makes Zero Dark Thirty really interesting is how Kathryn Bigelow and her crew visualize how the lair would look on the inside, and ultimately, how SEAL Team 6 would penetrate the fortress to get to the room bin Laden was hiding in. In terms of SEAL Team 6, I find it interesting that Zero Dark Thirty purports that the stealth helicopters the DEVGRU (United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group...another name for SEAL Team 6) operators flew to Abbottabad in were secretly stored at Area 51 in Nevada. Hey, Bigelow had to find some kind of explanation about where these choppers were before coming into use for the bin Laden raid. Speaking of the bin Laden raid...
For me, the highlight of Zero Dark Thirty is when Maya finally meets the Navy SEALs who would complete the job that Maya had feverishly been working on since 2003. We get to know two of the DEVGRU operators (even though everything about them in this film is fictional), Patrick (Joel Edgerton) and Justin (Chris Pratt). Since we know that SEAL Team 6 didn't incur any casualties during the raid on bin Laden's compound, we shouldn't be surprised that Bigelow portrayed these soldiers as extremely confident and efficient (which I'm sure they are in real-life) on the big screen. When these SEALs finally don their armor and strap on their weapons, and lift off in the two stealth choppers with Maya watching from the ground, that's when we finally prepare to see bin Laden's fate conveyed on screen.
I don't know about the rest of the audience whom I saw the movie with last Friday, but I felt chills as the two choppers carrying SEAL Team 6 quietly made their way through mountainous terrain as they headed to bin Laden's compound. To watch as the choppers arrive at the lair, with the DEVGRU operators lowering their night vision goggles before extracting from the helicopters, was awesome. For folks who enjoy war movies, it is never too tiring to see soldiers head off into combat...whether it is in Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Bigelow's previous film The Hurt Locker, or this one. Knowing what transpired in the bin Laden raid from reading dozens of articles in newspapers and online, I couldn't help but be transfixed by how Bigelow dramatized the major events of 5/1/11 on the big screen...from one of the stealth choppers making a hard landing near the compound (due to rotor wash caused by flying too close to a wall), to how the DEVGRU operators eliminate the courier and then locating a vast cache of computer hard drives, CDs and other valuable sources of intel inside the main home. But ultimately, the biggest moment that brought chills down my spine (I'm exaggerating—kinda) is when SEAL Team 6 finally confronts "the third floor guy" and finishes him off.
A very nice touch in Zero Dark Thirty is the fact that we never fully see bin Laden's face before or after he meets his fate at the hands of U.S. special ops soldiers. Bin Laden was a phantom when Dan and Maya interrogated Ammar for his whereabouts at the beginning of the film, and bin Laden is still a phantom even as Maya stares down at his lifeless body when SEAL Team 6 returned to Afghanistan with it. In the final shot of Zero Dark Thirty, Maya expresses an emotion that she had no doubt been suppressing since 2003...and most likely before that. Two years before that, to be exact. Even if the majority of scenes in Zero Dark Thirty—especially the ones featuring so-called enhanced interrogation techniques—are exaggerated or flat-out fictional, the movie is still true in that the search for the man who caused the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans more than eleven years ago was a long and painful one. And seeing it come to an end finally allowed the people responsible for conducting this dogged but ultimately fruitful investigation to release their emotions. One word for why Kathryn Bigelow and other storytellers continue to deal with the topic of 9/11: catharsis. That is all.
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