Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty. Rated M (mature themes, violence and coarse language). 157 minutes. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by Mark Boal.

Verdict: A riveting film of raw and uncompromising drama.

Bigelow (the first woman to win an Academy Award® for Best Director for her film The Hurt Locker) and Boal (who won the Best Screenplay Oscar® for the same film), return to the killing fields for this riveting film about the hunt for the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.

In doing so, they cement their places as the cinematic chroniclers of an era as defined by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States of America. We all know how the hunt for Bin Laden ended but, quite miraculously, Bigelow’s telling of Boal’s forensic screenplay is never less than entirely absorbing – due, in no small way, to a brilliant performance from Jessica Chastain as Maya, a CIA operative whose obsession with finding and killing Bin Laden becomes dangerously all-encompassing.

Like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty is an involving study of the immense levels of duress individuals fighting terrorism experience. The attacks on civilians and intelligence personnel throughout this film are shockingly realistic, and serve to not only heighten the levels of tension to almost unbearable levels, but to also illustrate how ineffective the controversial torture procedures ultimately were in eliciting useful and timely counter-terrorism intelligence.

Chastain receives excellent support from Australian-born Jason Clarke as Dan, the CIA operative charged with gathering intelligence through the inhumane torture procedures that – even if only with wearying hindsight – were doomed to fail. Jennifer Ehle (Contagion) is superb as Maya’s colleague Jessica, whose enthusiasm for a more collaborative effort to end the attacks, is ruthlessly destroyed in one of the film’s many sequences of complete and unexpected brutality.

Melbourne-born cinematographer Greig Fraser (Snow White and the Huntsman, Let Me In, The Caterpillar Wish) captures every moment of the film’s vast geographical and human scale brilliantly, while editors William Goldenberg (Argo) and Dylan Tichenor (There Will Be Blood, Doubt, The Town) bring extraordinary levels of skill to the way the film’s levels of desperation and urgency escalate.

By focussing on the very human price of often futile, exhaustive (and exhausting) counter terrorism activities, and by refusing to drown in propaganda or sentimentality, Zero Dark Thirty is a very difficult film to experience. Its raw and uncompromising honesty makes it a film that is equally difficult to ignore and impossible to forget.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.