Zero Dark Thirty (2012) [Blu-ray]
Drama | History | Thriller

Tagline: For ten years one woman never stopped searching for the most wanted man in history.

For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (2009, Best Picture, The Hurt Locker) for the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man.

Storyline: Maya is a CIA operative whose first experience is in the interrogation of prisoners following the Al Qaeda attacks against the U.S. on the 11th September 2001. She is a reluctant participant in extreme duress applied to the detainees, but believes that the truth may only be obtained through such tactics. For several years, she is single-minded in her pursuit of leads to uncover the whereabouts of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama Bin Laden. Finally, in 2011, it appears that her work will pay off, and a U.S. Navy SEAL team is sent to kill or capture Bin Laden. But only Maya is confident Bin Laden is where she says he is. Written by Jim Beaver

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman on March 8, 2013 -- Zero Dark Thirty begins with a blurb that states the film has been built around "first hand accounts of actual events." And that's what has the movie squarely in the political arena's critical crosshairs. Director Katherine Bigelow's film, the followup to her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, is the story of a decade-long manhunt for Usama Bin Laden, a search that began immediately after hijacked passenger aircraft crashed into the World Trace Center towers, the Pentagon, and an empty Western Pennsylvania field (years earlier, really, but earnestly in the public eye only after 9/11). And as is apt to happen with any film that bluntly, or purportedly bluntly, recreates a critical moment in history -- be it The Passion of the Christ or Saving Private Ryan -- questions of purpose, authenticity, and agenda arose around Zero Dark Thirty with even the mere announcement of the project. At the forefront of the debate was the filmmakers' alleged access to classified materials and, later, the timing of its release scheduled just prior to the November 2012 Presidential elections. The former remains in question and the latter eventually evolved into a non-issue when Sony pushed the premiere date back to December 2012 and the wide release date into January 2013 (the "UBL raid movie before the election" gap was filled, however, by the almost equally controversial SEAL Team Six that aired on cable television literally hours before polls opened). But critics weren't finished. As Zero Dark Thirty opened to rave reviews and Oscar buzz, the film came under fire for its graphic depiction of torture and its reliance on torture as a device to advance the plot towards the unearthing of the information that would lead to the raid on the bin Laden compound. But no matter the politics, the authenticity and the purpose of the film's detailed intelligence maneuvers, or the film's more graphic moments, Zero Dark Thirty proves itself a steady, focused, intellectually and artistically superior cinema experience that trades in wartime gun play for a more dramatically intensive and deeply filling movie that's really about human obsession more so than politics, history, and/or current events.

Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a CIA operative recruited out of high school for her unflinching dedication to tracking down the world's most wanted terrorist, Usama bin Laden. She's participating in her first interrogation alongside her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke), a hardened operative well-versed in the ways of torture and information extraction. Their current subject is proving difficult to break. Ammar (Reda Kateb) is water boarded, poorly fed and hydrated, subjected to loud Heavy Metal music, stuffed inside a wooden box, and stripped before Maya. It takes some time, but he finally divulges a piece of intelligence that captures Maya's attention. He drops a name: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a man reportedly serving as a courier between high value persons of interest and none other than bin Laden himself. The lead never seems to go anywhere -- the courier is even once presumed dead -- but Maya refuses to give up on it, frustrating the Islamabad CIA Station Chief, Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler). But the further she digs, the more she believes the courier to be the key to tracking down the prize she's sought since September 11, 2001.

Kathryn Bigelow offsets the horrors -- and attempts to fend off controversies -- of the torture elements that figure so prominently into the film's first act with a gut-wrenching reminder of the terrors of September 11 in a blackened prologue that replays audio recordings from that day, and prominently featured is a woman speaking her final words to a 911 operator while surrounded by flames within one of the towers. It's the film's most harrowing moment and also its most important; that day is the driving force behind the entire plot, and even as the water boarding and other torture techniques are utilized by characters in the film, that phone call hangs over the entire process and settles into the audience's gut, not to cheer the characters on or to accept the torture outright but to at least provide a foundation for why it's happening in the greater scope of the decade-long search for UBL. Yet whether that phone call -- and the many others like it -- justifies the torture isn't the real issue here. In context it would seem the controversy over the torture's inclusion in the film is nothing more than a manufactured one for scoring points with the base on both sides of the isle. Support it or not, terror suspects with key information were tortured in the process of tracking down bin Laden -- this isn't fantasy or even pure fiction, historical fiction maybe but certainly not grossly altered if leaks and released documents are to be believed -- and the film makes it clear that the torture certainly doesn't sit well with its protagonist, even as forcefully singleminded and obsessed as she may be in tracking down the world's then-most wanted man. Leaving the torture of terror suspects out of the film, or significantly downplaying that angle, would be like ignoring the bloody island-hopping battles and the promise of a devastating assault on mainland Japans as key reasons for dropping atomic weapons to end World War II in the pacific theatre; agree with the decision or not it's historical fact and was backed by a justifiable position of saving more lives than the bombs ultimately took. Certainly, though, it's not universally agreed upon as either the right or wrong position, but it is one that's justifiable in context. The same applies here, and again, "justifiable" can and should be debated.

That notion of saving lives through destroying another permeates the entire film and the debate surrounding it. There's an "end justifies the means" conflict that runs through the film, and Bigelow and Screenwriter Mark Boal are careful to show both sides of that coin throughout. Torture does not stop several of the real-life terror attacks shown in the film. Highlighted is the Khobar Towers attack which Dan and Maya tell their terror suspect was thwarted, that the suspect unknowingly surrendered key information while under severe duress. They do so not to justify torture but rather to further break the suspect into divulging more information. It's an important moment in the film that demonstrates the potential futility of torture and instead the possible validity of misdirection and information gathering through alternate means (though still in a context of torture) in one case while heading towards the moment when the name of the courier is first revealed and, ultimately, when Usama Bin Laden is shot dead at the end of the film, an act celebrated by thousands on the night it was announced, through impromptu gatherings of thousands in cities around the United States and praised by pundits and personalities all over the airways and the Internet. Do those -- should those -- celebrations of the end also signify a celebration of the means, or can one celebrate the end but deplore the means? Even in Zero Dark Thirty the answer is never clear. Maya is so singularly focused on her task yet so obviously troubled by the interrogations that it's difficult to read her, at times. Of course, this is the same character who states she would rather drop a bomb on the Abbottabad compound -- to destroy everything in it -- rather than send in the SEALs ("the canaries," she calls them), a move which, ultimately, minimized the casualties inside the compound and saved the civilians' lives. The entire movie is a double-edged sword that's both very blunt but at the same time very surgical in how it wields its ideas and unfolds its story. It's a fascinating dichotomy that, support none, some, or all of the actions in the film, one cannot deny the dramatic impact of the story and the skill with which it is told.

Indeed, perhaps the most cinematically gripping piece of Zero Dark Thirty is its ability to so captivate its audience despite the foreknowledge of the outcome, and not just the outcome but some of the broader plot pieces necessary to reaching that climax, from the role of the courier in tracking down the target to the helicopter crash at the compound. In Zero Dark Thirty, it's witnessing the chess pieces position on the board that makes the movie so intense, from nearly blind attack in hopes of catching a break (the torture) to the final strategic placement leading to the checkmate, or the kill, a move -- all the moves, really -- the other side has no idea is even coming. This is a "how" movie -- its about how the operation came to fruition -- but it's also a "wow" movie in that it makes "how" something dramatically remarkable even considering the absence of broad suspense. It's in the details where the film finds its stride, in the authenticity about how well it goes about its business. Perhaps that's from where the criticisms stem. Zero Dark Thirty plays with so much genuine flair that audiences will feel like they're in the torture rooms, the meeting rooms, and on the raid with the SEALs. The picture makes procedure fascinating and the behind-the-scenes spy material enthralling. The picture is largely dramatic in flavor and eschews standard Hollywood violence in favor of a far more thoughtful story and realistic portrayal of military maneuvers at the end. The compound raid is less about gunfire and more about subtle movement. It's not a running gun battle but rather a slow buildup of breaching, positioning, and methodical room-by-room and floor-by-floor searching that's occasionally interrupted by very light and infrequent gunfire, a few squeezes of the trigger to put down an enemy and even less in terms of resistance from the compound's inhabitants. The very slow-devloping nature of the action actually serves to enhance the tension of the sequence, again even with the outcome already written in stone. This is tremendous filmmaking that, even under the haze of controversy, is very clear in its superiority against most other pictures of its kind.

Lastly, the on-camera performances are nearly as impressive as the off-camera work that went into making the movie feel as authentic as possible. While not every acting performance comes across as absolutely seamless, there's certainly an energy and authenticity to every part, all of the characters feeling very much inhabited and influenced by a lifetime's worth of dedication to their profession, be it the search for bin Laden, the interrogation of persons of interest, or the execution of precision military maneuvers. Most all of the performances are something above mere acting; Bigelow gets the very best from her cast, in large part due to the seriousness of the story, the dramatically intense tone, and the grittiness of the subject matter. Jason Clarke delivers the film's best performance as a hardened interrogator but also, as the film develops, a person with a heart and soul after all and another piece of the puzzle that counters the notion that the film unequivocally subscribes to the idea of torture as not even a necessary evil but something that should be done with little thought to the greater ethical and even, in some ways, spiritual implications. Jessica Chastain shows a solid range in the film but sometimes seems to force out some of the broader emotions. She does well in shaping her character's straightforward determination to capture the target but it sometimes feels as if more could have been done to more fully explore the inner dilemma that's often hinted but never fully brought to light.

[CSW] -3.8- Although this is generally a once-is-enough movie it is also a must-see-at-least-once movie. Based on true events the film follows a real life CIA operative (named Maya in the film) who still works for the agency and, indeed, was responsible for finding Bin Laden per The Washington Post. Throughout the film, Maya single-mindedly pursues Bin Laden until that fateful day in May 2011 when he was killed by Seal Team Six. It's not an easy film to watch. This is no light entertainment; not a fun night at the movies. Most of the characters are unsympathetic. And, for me at least, the movie brought forth waves of conflicting thoughts and emotions about how our nation responded to 9/11. It raised questions that can't be easily answered, if at all. It's a riveting film even though we already know how the story ends. You won't want to even blink during the last hour or so.
[V5.0-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

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