filmthug movies, reviews & rants: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty

Water bored

In the aftermath of the September 11th terror attacks on America’s Eastern Seaboard, an elite team of CIA agents spends the best part of a decade scouring the globe for the architect of the plot, al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden.

Seen through the eyes of one female analyst, Maya (Jessica Chastain), who journeys from fresh-faced rookie to battle-weary shell, the search for the world’s most wanted man takes it’s toll both professionally and personally on the hunters. As political administrations change and her colleagues waver uncertainly, only Maya remains resolute, devoting every waking moment to the hunt, her single-minded tenacity eventually paying off when she tracks her quarry to a fortified compound in a Pakistani suburb. But as her superiors drag their heels, reluctant to order the raid that will eliminate bin-Laden, Maya finds her fight is far from over…

Treading the same ground as the much shorter Codename: Geronimo, Kathryn Bigelow’s tortuous follow-up to The Hurt Locker throws us straight in at the deep end. Opening with a black screen and an audio montage consisting of the final, frantic, doomed phone calls from people trapped in the stricken World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, the film begins proper with Chastain’s Maya arriving at a CIA desert ‘black site’ where she observes her immediate superior Dan (an electric Jason Clarke) interrogate a suspect with links to al-Qaeda. We watch with her as Dan questions his prisoner; coaxing, cajoling, brow-beating as he tries to break him down before escalating to more physical coercion, beating, water boarding, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, Dan constantly telling his prisoner: “When you lie to me, I hurt you.” It’s a harrowing, disorienting opening, one that leaves you stunned and addresses right from the start, without ever condemning or condoning, the film’s most controversial aspect, the issue of torture. It’s also an opening that the film never really recovers from, struggling for the rest of its running time to ever make you feel that involved again.

As much as time is the enemy in the hunt for bin Laden (we watch as trails go cold, as governments, policies and priorities change), time is also the enemy of the film. In trying to compress a decade into two and a half hours, Zero Dark Thirty feels flabby and episodic, it’s sprawling length serving to numb you. We already know how it ends making the film a largely tension-free exercise, devoid of urgency, with the climactic raid feeling strangely rushed, lacking excitement. But perhaps the film’s greatest drawback is its protagonist. As her colleagues come and go (some burn out, some die) Maya is the one constant in the hunt, the fanatic hunting a fanatic. It’s just unfortunate that she’s probably the least interesting character in the film.

Bigelow’s always had a knack for creating films around flawed but fascinating, obsessive characters; the white-trash vampires of Near Dark, Jamie Lee Curtis’ rookie cop in Blue Steel, Patrick Swayze’s thrill-seeking surfer/bank robber in Point Break, Ralph Fiennes’ sleazy dream merchant in Strange Days, Jeremy Renner’s war-junkie in The Hurt Locker. Maya’s just not in the same league. She’s a friendless, single-minded automaton we’re asked to believe was recruited straight out of high school (Really? No college? No military or law enforcement background? The CIA is just cruising the halls of Sweet Valley High looking for ginger girls who’ll burn like charcoal briquettes in the Pakistani sun?), totally devoted to her quest to the exclusion of any form of personal life. She’s a cipher we never get to know, like or care about and Jessica Chastain plays her as an occasionally shouty, passive-aggressive, know-it-all. She lacks the magnetic intensity of Bigelow’s other protagonists. The film is much better served by its supporting cast with Joel Edgerton on cool, laconic form as the SEAL team leader, Mark Strong and James Gandolfini good as Maya’s Washington bosses, an always excellent, and always criminally under-used, Jennifer Ehle as Maya’s colleague and the closest thing she has to a friend and Harold Perrineau and Mark Duplass popping up in small but pivotal roles. But the film belongs to Chastain’s Lawless co-star Clarke. He’s never been better and when he’s off-screen his absence is keenly felt.

Authentic and sporadically engrossing, Zero Dark Thirty is an unsentimental and, ultimately, unsatisfying account of the world’s greatest manhunt that’s very even-handedness and refusal to take a political viewpoint may just be what makes it Bigelow’s weakest, most uninvolving film in years.

David Watson

Directed by:

Kathryn Bigelow

Written by:

Mark Boal

Produced by:

Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal and Megan Ellison

Starring: