“I don’t go to the movies to watch a reenactment of the news.” I was recently given this as an explanation as to why someone was not going to go see Zero Dark Thirty, and fair enough. I understand everyone has different tastes when it comes to their movie choices and I will respect that. When given this as an explanation I watched the trailers again and noticed an apparent issue with the advertising campaign: Zero Dark Thirty is not the story of the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, it is about one woman who has dedicated her life to a mission and will do absolutely anything in order to complete it. Yes that mission is to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but that isn’t the point. This could very well be the story of a woman who wants to become president, this version just happens to be true. I also noticed the trailers almost go out of their way to not show that side of the story with Jessica Chastain having one spoken like (that did not make the final cut of the film) and less than ten seconds of screen time combined. Meticulously researched and considered to be remarkably accurate, Zero Dark Thirty will long be considered the definitive account of what occurred the years leading up to bin Laden’s death, at least until the official reports are declassified. In 2010 Katherine Bigelow had teamed up with her The Hurt Locker partner Mark Boal to create a film known as Untitled bin Laden Project. In 2011 the movie took a new ending and, from the sounds of it, a very different plot due to the successful raid on bin Laden’s Islamabad bunker. While I know nothing of what the original plotline entailed, I can’t imagine it would have been anything nearly as well done as this.
Before the screen shows any images the words “September 11, 2001” appear and for the next minute or so the screen remains black and we hear sounds of news reports, 911 calls, and the panic and hysteria that surrounded the day. There is a telephone call to a 9-1-1 dispatcher describing the intense heat and how scared she was. We hear a loud sound. The dispatcher says “Hello?” Nobody answers. Make no mistake, I am very much opposed to the idea of using 9/11 to draw a connection to characters (just ask me about another movie that does this, I will go on a tirade) and that is not Bigelow’s intention. She uses this minute to remind us what the world was like on that day. The aforementioned panic and hysteria, the entire world focusing on a solitary event, the sadness that followed, the lives lost. When we cameras first start rolling we are now in 2003 watching a POW being interrogated and tortured by Dan (Jason Clarke) with Maya (Chastain) watching on her first day in the field. The torture, including waterboarding, is clearly taking its toll on Maya, who is on her first day, but she refuses to watch from the monitor outside. She will get through this and she will prove to be strong and worthy of the job. Later in the film we find out she is so headstrong when the director of the CIA (James Gandolfini) asks when Maya was approached by the CIA. She says that she was recruited directly out of high school. He then asks what jobs she has been given since signing on and all she says is “to find bin Laden.” It’s the only job she ever had, and presumably the only one she ever wanted. She is perfect for it, or as one of her bosses puts it, “she’s a killer.” The torture does not directly lead to any useful information, however when they lie to the prisoner and tell him his info saved a lot of people and fed him solid food he decides to give the name of a messenger: Abu Ahmed. This single name would be Maya’s major point of emphasis over the next 8 years. Maya is convinced that this name carries significance and will lead her to where she wants to get. As the years go by she is present at a hotel bombing, her car is shot at, and her friends die. All this time passes and her lead is a dead end and bin Laden is still out there.
The rest of the story is well documented and unnecessary to go over here. What is necessary to mention is the brilliance of Chastain. She manages to become unrecognizable in her portrayal of Maya. This is without using prosthetics, massive weight gain/loss, or any of Hollywood’s other makeup tricks because she doesn’t physically transform at all. The mentality and power of her performance left me forgetting I was watching an actress at work and instead had me believing this was just Maya. She manages to stand out among an all star cast of supporting characters in Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Mark Strong, Fredric Lehne, Mark Duplass, James Gandolfini, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Taylor Kinney, and Mike Colter. I came into the movie as a big fan of Chastain from her work in Take Shelter and The Tree of Life, not to mention her Academy Award nominated work in The Help, but I left the theater as a believer that she is one of the best actresses currently working. The perfect examples is after Maya has found what she believes to be the compound where bin Laden is staying she decides to write 21 in red on her bosses window for the number of days that have passed without anything happening. She is shown multiple times changing this number and she brings something new and more frustration each time it happens. It’s a small thing, but those are where actors show their true skill.
As far as the movie is concerned, ignore the Senators debating about the realism of the torture scenes, the fact that you know how it ends, and the idea that this is just glorifying the murder of a man (justified or not) and realize this is a movie about something much smaller. The president who declared the war on terror is never screen or mentioned and the president who ordered the raid is never mentioned by name and is only shown on a television explaining to an interviewer that the U.S. is a peaceful nation that will not torture people, while Maya watches with a look that practically screams “but then we could get somewhere!” This movie was not made from the left or right-wing perspective and it was not made to glorify or damn torture. It was made to show one woman’s remarkable fire and determination through a 12 year journey. 40% of her entire life was spent for this one mission and she has given everything for it. The final scene after she gets what she wants, what she was recruited and trained to do, tells us everything we need to know.
A
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