Zero Dark Thirty: How 9/11 was avenged

The story is a familiar one.  After 9/11, Osama bin Laden eluded the intelligence agencies tasked to  find and kill him (or KBL) for the better part of 10 years.  Then, on May 2, 2011, members of famed Seal Team 6 finally tracked him to a heavily fortified compound in Pakistan and accomplished their mission, giving President Obama a major coup and America a great symbolic victory in the War Against Terror.  

 

So, when the inevitable Hollywood movie was announced, who better to helm it than Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Oscar-winning 'The Hurt Locker'?  Bigelow always had a great flair for gritty and realistic dramatic narrative, even during her early career in movies such as 'Near Dark' and 'Point Break.'  And she's certainly making more headlines right now than her ex-husband, director James Cameron.

 

In 'Zero Dark Thirty' (named for 'Thirty Minutes After Midnight'), Bigelow tells her story straight, lending the movie the same realism and immediacy as 'The Hurt Locker.'  At nearly three hours, the movie does border on the exhaustive, but the pace never flagged.  We get a glimpse of not only how our nation's intelligence works at a practical level (not just torture, which is a very small portion of the whole movie), but also the efforts, toils and sacrifice of the men and women involved.  0D30 is much more of a political thriller than an action movie; you won't see any James Bond derring-do's here.  Even the Seal Team action which took bin Laden down was methodical and workman-like in its efficiency.  In fact, most of the movie focuses on what are essentially dry detective work, not unlike all those procedurals you see on CBS.

 

Jessica Chastain portrayed the intelligence officer (an analyst, not a field operative) who was recruited right out of high school by the CIA to hunt for bin Laden.  As in 'The Debt,' in which she played a young Mossad agent back in the 1960's, Chastain relished in her role, displaying a combination of intelligence, hard-headedness and vulnerability that can be, well, somewhat sexy.  How much of 0D30 is true and how much is glorified Hollywood tripe, we'll perhaps never know, but as a tale of how America's 'Public Enemy Number One' was finally brought to justice (that is, killed), the movie did its job quite well.

Grade: A-minus