Zero Dark Thirty, 2012.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt, Kyle Chandler, Taylor Kinney, Mark Duplass, Frank Grillo, Stephen Dillane, Edgar Ramirez, Harold Perrineau, Jennifer Ehle, James Gandolfini, Scott Adkins and John Barrowman.
SYNOPSIS:
A dramatisation of the decade-long manhunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the 2011 raid to kill the al Qaeda chief.
What makes a great movie? It’s not always easy to put into words, which is a challenge when your job is writing about film. Often times it’s the intangibles that make the difference between something that is very well done and something that is exceptional. Little things you can’t always put your finger on. And that is what I exhaustively struggled with after seeing the new thriller Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a very good film, one that’s being discussed as the frontrunner in several major film competitions as the best picture of the year. Yet, I’m having trouble agreeing with that assessment.
Expectations can often be an albatross around the neck of a film. After hearing praise being heaped upon the latest film from Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), it was difficult not to expect something exceptional. While Zero Dark Thirty is a very well executed thriller, it’s not a particularly engaging one.
The film chronicles the ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden and the CIA Operative who makes hunting him her personal priority. Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a focused and driven agent who tirelessly works to find connections that will lead to the terrorist leader. The film opens with an exceptionally clever way at handling 9/11 and the impact it had on the nation. Within two minutes that sense of tragedy and loss has permeated the theater.
Then we cut ahead a few years to the interrogation of a suspected al Qaeda operative. An interrogation that features some brutal techniques and some downright disgusting treatment. Much like The Hurt Locker, Bigelow doesn’t try to over dramatize these moments or heighten them. She lets the stark imagery and horrid behavior speak for itself. Watching another man beaten and water boarded is an uncomfortable sight. What’s just as disconcerting is how the characters inflicting this violence seem unaffected. Their job is to extract information, and they sink to terrible depths to try and unearth it. There’s some real impact to these scenes and it paints the protagonist in a particularly unpleasant light.
As the hunt continues, the audience is taken through a series of scenes and characters, never really holding long enough to be invested in any of them. Maya joins a team searching for leads in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The amount of data they have to sort through and dots they need to connect are staggering. Zero Dark Thirty does a great job of making this manhunt seem monumental. The difficulties involved, from gathering raw data to dealing with the politics of the war on terror, create a series of obstacles that Maya must clear. On top of that, Maya and her colleagues become targets for terrorist cells making navigating the territory that much more difficult.
I liked this movie. It’s very well done. But it’s sorely lacking in a few areas. The procedural style Bigelow chose for the story has some benefits. It’s melodrama free and does not spend time weighing judgments on the characters or their actions. This isn’t a morality tale. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of a morality tale. There are no morals here. Just flawed human beings with a job to do and almost zero apprehension in the techniques they employ to see it done. Often times the characters seeking out the terrorists seem remarkably similar in their ruthlessness. And yet, there is no real humanity to the characters at all. Jessica Chastain is a fine actress, but her role feels strangely familiar. Maybe if I hadn’t seen Claire Danes in Homeland Chastain would have felt more original. But I’ve seen this character before. The determined young operative who pushes herself to the limits to find a target. Maya’s only real character trait is persistence. She has very little to do other than be determined. There’s so little fragility or vulnerability to her character. She’s practically a robot. Even in the film’s final moments when they give her that moment of release, it feels obligatory and poorly timed. Bigelow spends the final frames trying to tell us that this is one woman’s story, but the rest of the film is a scattershot and often schizophrenic from a storytelling perspective.
As a procedural drama, Zero Dark Thirty works. It’s a fascinating look at the massive effort staged to hunt down one man. The third act is almost perfect. There we get to briefly meet the team tasked with storming the compound where bin Laden had holed up. Chris Pratt is by far the standout performance in this movie as a Seal Team member and serves as the only relatable character in the film. He has a small arc in the third act which feels more human and more complete than anything else in the film. I think that’s what I was missing more of in Zero Dark Thirty: something or someone to relate to.
As an American, I understand the outrage that 9/11 brings up. To a degree, I understand the mania surrounding his manhunt. The movie does such a good job of detailing the ‘what’, but it’s piss poor in delivering me the ‘who’. Who are these people? Why do they do what they do? Bigelow’s approach to telling this story is less emotionally effective and more akin to a documentary style reenactment than a story driven narrative. It’s random scenes strung together sometimes jumping several years. There’s no cohesion there and very little for the audience to invest in.
I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to Ben Affleck’s excellent Argo, a movie that took real life events and made it into an effective thriller. Where Zero Dark Thirty pulls back and is blunt in its approach, Argo added a little bit of cheese and tried to force some added drama to the proceedings. To me, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo represent two distinct types of storytelling. Almost a litmus test for the type of movies people prefer. Do you prefer the deadpan, stark type of story that Bigelow presents in Zero Dark Thirty: unpretentious, direct, and melodrama free? Or do you like Affleck’s more audience friendly traditional film storytelling complete with a runway chase scene at the end for added impact?
I prefer the latter. I like the soft approach Bigelow took to tell this story, but it feels so removed emotionally that I found myself uninterested in the characters and felt no investment in their mission. There’s a lot to like in Zero Dark Thirty, but it’s a movie that feels like it could have tried harder. Technically, it’s exceptionally well done. Emotionally, it’s pretty vacant. Sure, you will have a strong reaction to the opening scene and depictions of torture. And the final act where they storm the compound is pretty thrilling. However, the middle is a scattershot collection of moments that will do little to draw you in. Like the title, Zero Dark Thirty is nebulous and undefined.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★
Anghus Houvouras
