Starring: Jessica Chastain, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, James Gandolfini.
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Running time: 159 minutes
Released by: Universal Pictures
Out:25th January
A little like Michael Moore's agitant documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, the start of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty begins in darkness with only the ominous soundtrack of 9/11's historical events to suggest the film has started... and to remind us that sometimes real-life is just as dramatic as any Hollywood fiction. Though, admittedly, the two films are very different in any number of ways and diverse significantly thereafter, it is not unreasonable to note that both were already lined up in pundits' gun-scopes for judgement before ever making it to the screen. Such is the primal nature of the subject-matter. Such is the nature of the film-makers. Such is the nature of what is 'true'...
Bigelow's last film was The Hurt Locker, another film positioning itself on the frontline, but one dripping with minute-to-minute tension as audiences quickly learned that any of the characters who populated the story of bomb-disposal experts in Iraq might be expendable. It rightly garnered her an Academy Award nomination and then an eventual win. Zero Dark Thirty, once again teaming her with Locker's screenwriter Mark Boal, is a different animal entirely, one slouching towards Bethlehem rather than ticking down towards oblivion. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade you know that Osama Bin Laden... wasn't. After a decade of being the world's most wanted terrorist, a Seal Team entered a high-security compound in the heart of a Pakistan suburb and 'terminated him with extreme prejudice' in May 2011. This film is described as the investigation that led up to that moment.
Just how true the film is to the events it portrays is an ongoing debate. The focus is on Maya (Chastain), a driven, feisty analyst whose singular purpose in life is to track down bin Laden (or 'UBL' as the CIA calls him using the American 'Usama' spelling). She has no time for a private life and finds it hard to make friends, but she becomes a driving force in the small team of operatives who have survived the conflict and department budget cuts. Painfully slowly - and sometimes merely by chance - the pieces of the puzzle begin to come together. Climbing through mountains of paperwork, sifting through walls of photographs and applying 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on prisoners, Maya becomes convinced that previous intelligence on the terrorist mastermind is mistaken and that he and his network of terrorist cells may not be in Afghanistan at all. Now she has to convince her superiors that she's on the right track, but with limited resources and past failures... everything is on the line.
Sources close to the events that transpired around May 2nd 2011 would indicate that the details of the actual raid itself are pretty accurate, with Bigelow wisely deciding against a too gung-ho approach to the final Seal Team Six operation. But the film's main problems may be in what leads up to that moment, the investigation which is three-quarters of the film's running time 'Maya' is supposedly based on a real undercover operative, but though Chastain gives a solid, engaging performance, there's always the feeling that she's more an amalgamation of several analysts and given the attributes that will please the audience. That's common-place in any Hollywood's adaptation of 'real' events', but the film is getting more attention for the brutality against prisoners in its opening reel.
The argument of whether the 'enchanced techniques' used by the investigators were morally right, pragmatically necessary or even gave key components to the eventual operation is one open to many hours of debate and ultimately judged by history and your view of the bigger picture. The real problem is that Bigelow and Boal have somewhat tried to have their layer cake and eat it... they depict the brutal treatment as factual, but in doing so put themselves at odds with official American policy. This, at the same time as certain cable stations condemn them for getting privileged access from the Obama administration and acting as a re-election tool (a theory extinguished by viewing its content and the fact the release was delayed until Deceber 2012 in the US).
In short, for a film that sets out to tell the 'truth', it has placed itself firmly in an arena where someone is - to continue those convenient 'safe-words', being economical with the actualité . One suspects that no amount of water-boarding will ever fully divulge the particulars there.
Those expecting a red-white-and-blue romp with an overtly bloody climax will be disappointed. But judging it on its own merits, it is interesting if not always compelling.The pacing is that of a mini-series condensed down to a few hours and much of the film serves as walky-talky prologue to the raid that takes place in the final fifteen minutes. It's The West Wing meets Homeland with a subdued Call of Duty denouement. Having said all that, it's an interesting experience and one that comes across as better considered than the romp into which it could have been easily shaped.
8/10
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