Zero Dark Thirty: Review

By Spence Blazak

“Zero Dark Thirty” has the privilege of being in a situation like only a few movies before it. Unlike other epics based around historical events, such as “Titanic,” “Pearl Harbor,” or “Schindler’s List,” every single person seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film lived and is living through the tragedy that started it all as well as its repercussions on the American way of life, respectively. Bigelow needed to convey a tone of personal empathy to make the film work, and that she did, with the result being a film that is as 21^st Century American as it gets.

The film starts off in darkness. A graphic reading, “September 11, 2001” appears on the screen. The glass pane of silence is broken with a flood of overlapping calls to a 911 dispatcher. Each call a vividly personal portrait of a life ruined that infamous day.

Jump forward to a Pakistan interrogation camp. A CIA operative identified throughout the film as only Maya (Jessica Chastain, “The Help”) is at her first day on the job and witnesses first handed the “aggressive questioning” of a possible Osama Bin Laden foot soldier. This is the beginning of Maya’s decade long investigative pursuit, ending with the May 1, 2011 raid that brought down the world’s most wanted man.

Clocking in at 2 hour and 37 minutes, and with a tone of that you would expect from a movie about the hunt for Bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty” is a whole lot of movie, but well worth the trip. It takes the tone of a less Romanticized episode of “Homeland,” and it pulls off a tidal wave of perpetual seriousness as well as anything of its nature. Don’t let its lengthy runtime be discouraging, because its riveting nature and strong pacing keep it from having any parts that drag.

Kathryn Bigelow reunited with writer of “The Hurt Locker” Mark Boal, and the pair works off each other like a doubles team in tennis yet again. Boal’s knack for letting things remain unsaid complements Bigelow’s veritas direction style for grand effect. One of the duo’s most interesting contributions to the project is leaving the background of all the characters hazy. There is no distraction from the procedural hunt that the film directly chronicles, such as a character having a needless alcohol abuse issue or a clichéd messy home life. “Zero Dark Thirty” is about people doing their jobs.

At the center of this all is Jessica Chastain’s lead performance, which is already the front-runner for the Gold Statue this February. A far cry from the psychotic Carrie on “Homeland,” Chastain’s Maya is a woman shrouded in mystery, yet gives the audience all the empathy and reliability that they need from her facial reactions to waterboarding and her outbursts at apathetic bureaucrats rather than a heavy handed expositional speech about her background. Her obsessiveness is portrayed without any judgment from the camera, and her humanity shines throughout to show she isn’t just an angelic worker drone.

“Zero Dark Thirty” has a lot on its plate. It portrays with finesse the bloodhound work ethics of people who go above and beyond, summed up with a chilling beauty in the film’s unofficial theme song, an a cappella cover of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” It does a brilliant job of showing that everyone who had a part in the operation, at their core, is really just, as my roommate says, "regular ass dude."

The morality play of the torture scenes is enough to make an Ethics professor shrug in paradox. Yes, the men are tortured....but after all they aren't having their toes cut off or anything....and they did cause 9/11.....You're mind will be Boggled for at least 3 days after.

One of its most powerful and well-executed themes is that of the Second Act Syndrome, an A-bomb of an ending for many great stories following a person with a goal: after the hero finally does what they needed to do…then what? The film’s last shot is a killer. Possibly the best film of the year, “Zero Dark Thirty” might be peerless.

As far as a star rating goes for this one, at this point in time I could not really find anything that I thought could have been done better, and by that standard, it is, to me, a 4 star movie. If  “World Trade Center” is a 1 starer and “United 93” is a 3-and-a-half starer, then “Zero Dark Thirty” gets a 4 star stamp of approval from Wookiee Wednesday.

Stay tuned for W.W.'s Oscar Preview! Breaking down the pretentious art house movies so you can be topical!