Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty advertises itself as the movie about the “greatest manhunt in history” which when looked at closely is more so for the audiences back home rather than globally. This exhaustive chronicle for the C.I.A.'s hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the post-9/11 world plays out like a high-tech sophisticated Nancy Drew novel with Jessica Chastain playing the central snooping character; she even gets her own hardy boys to tag along on this one.

Beginning in 2003, the movie picks up with Maya (Jessica Chastain) a young analyst who's working with the C.I.A. and has been sent to Pakistan to work on locating Osama Bin Laden being part of a larger team who seem less driven than she does. Dan (Jason Clarke) is her superior officer and Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) the station chief for Pakistan. Though she tries to hide it, she is initially squeamish about the torture methods employed by the agency on detainees, something which she overcomes later. Over the years she painstakingly tries to cover each lead and milk every contact to find Bin Laden. Co-workers grow disillusioned and leave, some are assassinated, others manoeuvred out by office politics but Maya's focus remains and grows stronger. Then finally it all pays off and the rest they say is history.

The movie has its heart in the right place and presents the events leading up to the killing of Osama with utmost precision. However by focusing on Maya, it almost belittles the efforts of others as they are simply presented as cogs in the wheel. Some like Dan and Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) who have stronger and better rounded characters than Maya are not given enough time to develop on their own. The almost surgical and sterile approach it uses to present the events begs to infuse a touch of humanity which is utterly lacking. Scenes like the one in which Mark Strong's character walks into a conference room of the Osama Bin Laden task force and give them a heated speech about enough not being done to find the terrorist, reek of showmanship. It's almost like someone on the team saw 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and said why not ape Alec Baldwin's speech from that. It feels forced and it may be perfectly real and well acted but in the context of the movie it has little emotional impact.

Even the scenes with Edgar Ramirez's team hunting down an important courier of Osama's in a crowded market place lack that zing which we have already seen in plenty of spy-thrillers so far. The final raid is well shot and so are plenty of other scenes but the aloofness of the camera can be jarring at times.

Jessica Chastain is good, all nerves of steel and all but it's Jason Clarke who for me was the most real character throughout. The movie has plenty of other familiar faces in smaller roles which lends some amount of credibility to the final product but most have little to work with beyond token outburst of profanity.

The movie's clinical screenplay is ably supported by technical prowess but has no heart and that's ultimately what the movie probably needed the most.

O Womaniya I don't remember when was the last time i was so glued to a movie but this film had me glued at every second of it's running time of 2hr 40 minutes, every line spoken, every information revealed.the best time i had so far this year at the movies.

Publicised as the film about the decade long hunt for Osama, the screenplay largely focuses on hunting down a person who goes by the name Abu Ahmad. he is suspected to be a personal courier to Bin laden. The screenplay puts you right in the centre of the action as it unfolds.it is taut,tense and disturbing with an extremely controlled direction by Kathryn Bigelow.

Jaadu hai junoon hai yeh kaisi maya hai yeh maya hai. Jessica Chastain plays Maya the woman who spent half her working life in search of Osama. She is outstandingly brilliant. At one point her superior asks her " how long have you been working on this?" She replies " 12 years". Don't know how much is fact and how much is fiction but looks like Maya's life was written alongside of Osama's.

While watching the film i marvelled at the work of writer Mark Boal. To take all this research and data and strip it down to a screenplay that throws out information at you yet stays away from coming across like a documentary is work of true craft.

Word of mouth - Two words why you must watch this film. Kathryn and Jessica. Do.Not.Miss.This.

Rating - **** (very good)

Ticket meter - worth any amount.

There is a scene in the film where a character walks into a room and lashes out a tirade about 9/11 and how they haven't done anything about it for years. He ends his speech by saying “Do your f****n' jobs, bring me people to kill”. Be it scenes like these or the torture scenes. I'm not sure whether Kathryn Bigelow, fresh off her successful filmmaking run with The Hurt Locker (2009), is talking about the morals involved. Depiction is not endorsement, she says. In every interview she has been giving since 2009, she describes her films as a “boots on the ground experience”. While they aren't documentaries, they are meant to put you smack into the action.

Zero Dark Thirty is about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (or UBL - U for Usama, like the pretentious CIA types would call it). We already know the ending, no spoilers there. The film begins with voices of the victims of 9/11 over a black screen and the rest is a journalistic account of the intelligence proceedings for the most part while the last half hour is the actual raid on the compound, which housed the enemy. The protagonist is Maya (Jessica Chastain), a woman who wants the antagonist dead. It is interesting to note Maya is the Sanskrit word for illusion. It is the physical and mental reality that our consciousness is stuck in.

Personally, I am interested in a film like this because the filmmaker is more interested in the people who are involved in bringing the man down than the hunt itself. Who are these people? Just like James in The Hurt Locker, which wasn't exactly a film about the Iraq war but the kind of people who choose to be in the midst of war. Not the ones who create war or finish wars but those who are directly affected by it because of the nature of their jobs. Somebody must have these jobs, right? What kind of a person would take up such a job? Maya and James are two sides of the same coin. I could also find a direct parallel with one of Bigelow's early films - Blue Steel (1989). A film ridiculed for its illogical plot but stands as one of my favorite films by her. It is about a woman hunting a psychotic serial killer. She is obsessed with bringing him down and for most of the film, she works on a hunch.

You have to hand it to Bigelow for her terrific filmmaking technique. Certain scenes are chilling and quite simply staggering. You also have to hand it to Jessica Chastain and her astonishing performance. Watching her relentlessness and slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with is a thrill to watch. For me, it all actually comes down to the one moment at the very end of the film, my favorite one in the film. (Revealing more would be a spoiler)

Bigelow loves men and women who are devoted to their jobs. They are driven by one thing, one drug. Their lives are centered on getting their fix. I don't know if I can ever love her films wholeheartedly apart from Near Dark (1987). Although, I do know this, if there ever were movies to be made around the Iraq War or the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, nobody could have made better ones. Not because I love these films but because this is the most I could love films like these.

I also know she is one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Not just for what she means as an icon for women in filmmaking, but for political filmmaking. Anybody could have made a film about the killing of Bin Laden. It is the perfect recipe for American jingoism. Paraphrasing from the film, this is not political, it is a risk. Kathryn Bigelow gives the American public the action thriller they need, but she also gives them conversations about the long process of capturing a global villain. She gives them a cathartic climax with Bin Laden being executed (who has become a faceless enemy) but she leaves them with a question: Where do you want to go from here, America? I'd like to end my review with a quote by a political icon that is not used in the film but struck me right after the film ended: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

While The Hurt Locker periodically offered potent doses of thrills, Zero Dark Thirty brings out the frustrating and hard ways of gathering intelligence and constantly hitting dead ends. The film follows breadcrumbs, sparsely sprinkled across the length of the breadth. The trails are so thin, there are times when the story appears to be going nowhere. It's a densely written work with a lot of facts and names. We all know how things end. The important task for Bigelow was to keep us invested in the process and sustain our interest till the very end. I must say she has managed to do exactly that.

I must confess I was most excited about the final scene. Honestly, I was a bit curious to know how the leads appeared but I didn't care much for them next to the actual raid. That was a historical moment. It's like recreating the Kennedy assassination. We've all read about it and seen animated representations on CNN but the picture never came clearly to our head. The fact that they are selling it as "the greatest manhunt in history" itself underlines the importance of the subject. The film sears you with boundless thrill as two choppers stealthily fly low over a dark and sleepy Pakistan. In that moment, I had this photograph appear in my head; the one that was splashed on newspapers across the world; the one with Obama, Clinton, Biden and other top staffs attentively watching a television screen showing live-feed from the cameras on the Navy Seal Team's head gear. How much this one event meant to them, not just politically, and to the world in general was what that made watching the climax all the more special.

During the raid sequence, the film sticks to minimal action and known facts. I remember reading that one of the two Navy SEAL choppers crash landed inside the Abbottabad complex. It was just a piece of information whose gravity didn't get to me. But watching the dramatized version made me realize how absurdly wrong things went. Zero Dark Thirty is an action film but unlike any other. In the film's most important juncture, Chris Pratt's character whispers 'Osama' in a fake accent hoping to lure his prize out. I hope it was intended to be funny, because it was hilarious. Just because the trick worked for him once before, him trying the same once again turned the moment into something so funny that every last bit of tension was diffused. Even the most important bullet in the film is fired without any dramatic build-up and OBL lays dead before you know it.

It is not a cheery movie. In its closing moments, it doesn't fill us with optimism and leaves our veins pumping with patriotism. The film actually continues with the "The rush of battle... for war is a drug." theme previously explored in detail in The Hurt Locker. Here is a person who was recruited to CIA straight out of high-school, is not an easy person to work with, has no real friends and has a career solely defined by this one single mission. She cannot afford to fail. And the inevitable sense of loss that washes over her at the end is palpable. She's the superhero who lost her nemesis and couldn't help but shed a tear. Once the weight gets lifted from her shoulders and she comes face to face with the sudden closure, the magnitude of the emotions bears her down.

William Goldenberg, who also worked on Argo, has co-edited this film and the pacing is very good. Boasting a stunning ensemble cast, Zero Dark Thirty is a very well crafted film. It may not break my top 10, but I am glad I caught this on the big screen.

The film opens up with a blank screen facing us and the audio playing from news reports, 911 conversations after the 9/11 attack. We are hooked. Kathryn Bigelow knows how to grab our attention and the question is will she be able to hold it for 157 minutes. Everyone is aware of what went through in the capture of Osama Bin Laden. It has been talked about and America has called it one of its greatest triumphs. So in the wake of things, the film will work for just the topic it is handling and though not an expose or a thriller per se but Kathryn Bigelow's spy-drama is a courageous attempt.

Here's the full review :
http://hitheshdevasya.blogspot.in/2013/01/zero-dark-thirty2012.html