Reviewed by Ramona Prioleau

Released in 2012, Zero Dark Thirty is director Kathryn Bigelow’s follow up to 2009’s The Hurt Locker. Another war film, Zero Dark Thirty follows the years-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, starting at the September 11th terrorist attacks and spanning an entire decade until his eventual assassination in 2011. The film, while heavily dramatized, is based on real events, and its telling of the hunt for Bin Laden is detail-oriented and meticulous from the start. There’s action and suspense in spades, but the best parts of the film are the sequences that involve the quieter, intelligent search for evidence.

It’s always fascinating when a film where the ending is already known ends up being this suspenseful. Bigelow and her writing partner Mark Boal have stitched together a film that, even with a longer runtime, moves sharply and quickly. At the center of all this is Jessica Chastain, who plays Maya, a CIA agent whose entire career has been dedicated to finding Bin Laden. We know little more about her than that—she was recruited out of high school and had been searching for the terrorist leader ever since. However, Chastain’s performance was rather remarkable. Maya is cold, intelligent and calculating, and Chastain’s subtle and exact performance brings a much-needed level-headedness to the whirlwind investigation at the film’s heart.

In a manner similar to The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow toes a careful line here between semi-documentary and spectacle, between a critique of war and an outright celebration of it. In the end, it’s not quite as effective as The Hurt Locker, but it’s easy to imagine that, in the hands of another director, Zero Dark Thirty could’ve gone turned into a scathing portrait of war or, conversely, a voyeuristic parade of it. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle. The dramatization of it all is hard not to get wrapped up in, but going into the film expecting an exact historical record is not advised. Even so, were a male action director at the helm of this film instead of Bigelow, it’s likely that the machismo would’ve won outright. Instead though, the film is full of nuance, even if it is a bit unevenly distributed.

Bigelow is not stranger to ambiguity through, and, in the end, Zero Dark Thirty may be her hardest work to read yet. Controversial torture scenes are just the tip of the iceburg, and, like she did in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow doesn’t give us any straight answers. Her films are captivating and immensely watchable, but what they have to say about war in general and about Americans at war specifically is never quite explicit. It’s left for the viewer to decide.M

May 2022