September 11, 2001 is my generation’s November 22, 1963. To this day, I get asked from time to time where I was when the attacks on the World Trade Center happened. It is a day I will never forget, just three weeks after the birth of my first child. However, what came afterwards is almost equally haunting. President George W. Bush used this tragedy to launch an invasion in the Middle East, overthrow the government in Iraq, assassinate Saddam Hussein, and plunge America into a decades-long war on terrorism that we are still feeling nearly twenty-five years later. For years, it felt like we were chasing ghosts, capturing or killing someone that was apparently important, but never quite finding the man who was reported as the mastermind of that terrorist attack: Osama bin Laden.
I said I remember vividly the moment of the attacks on September 11th. I also remember coming into work one evening, many years later, and my manager pulling the whole team together to proudly declare that bin Laden was dead, killed in a raid in Pakistan nearly ten years after he became the most wanted man on planet Earth. Details were sparse but certain: Osama bin Laden had been found and killed. While the knowledge of his death brought with it some inherited relief, it did not bring with it much of a sense of triumph the way I had expected it to. There were still other high-end terrorists out there who would surely step into the void left by bin Laden, and the attacks would continue on. That’s how I felt then, and that hasn’t changed much since. The world is a violent place, and, just like the Hydra, cut off its head, and another one will take its place. I’m certain I am not the only one who felt this way, too. The writers of Zero Dark Thirty address this in the closing moments of their film when Maya (Jessica Chastain) opens up the body bag containing the remains of bin Laden. There is no feeling of triumph or excitement for her, only hollowness and a loss of direction.
Kathryn Bigelow is not what I would consider a typical director. During a time in Hollywood where women directors were being pigeonholed and under represented, she was going toe-to-toe with the men directing action films, psychedelic sci-fi thrillers, and war dramas. I knew her from the hugely popular Point Break in 1991, but I had also seen Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker. At the time, I did not know that all of these films were made by the same person. That changed in 2008 when this little film, The Hurt Locker, turned into Oscar gold and propelled Kathryn Bigelow into being the first woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director. By 2008, that honor was long overdue, and it’s disappointing it took so long for the Academy to honor a woman in this category.
The Hurt Locker may have been the film to bring her to my attention, but it was just four years later that I would really get a feel for the kind of director she had the potential to be. Zero Dark Thirty was releasing less than two years after the events it would be portraying, and most of us had little understanding of those events that it would be showing us. While a fair amount of this film is fictionalized, enough of it is real to give us a sense of what the hunt for bin Laden was actually like and why it took so long to find him.
One of the most intriguing questions this film asks us is whether the ends justify the means. The film opens with CIA officer Dan Fuller (Jason Clarke) and Maya attending and participating in approved enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture) on Ammar (Reda Kateb), a detainee with suspected links to several of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks. Ammar is repeatedly beaten and humiliated, deprived of sleep, and waterboarded all just to get unreliable information on a suspected attack in Saudi Arabia. He does, however, provide the name of the personal courier for bin Laden, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. This information, added to other intelligence information, begins to form a pattern that will eventually lead to the location of a compound that Maya is certain is the hiding place for Osama bin Laden. The next step would be convincing the US government that this is the actual place and to get authorization to send the troops in to capture or kill the terrorist leader.
This film is composed primarily of bits and pieces of information that add up to pinpointing bin Laden. Some of that information is interesting, and some of it is not. By the very nature of portraying real-world events, it limits the storytelling, especially if you want to stay somewhat factual in it. It is hard to tell an exciting story when everyone already knows the ending, but it can be done. So much of this film relies heavily on our wanting to know the details that when someone comes to the movie merely to be entertained, it will struggle to do just that.
Part of the problem there is Maya, herself. This is a composite character modeled in part after Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, who was given the moniker of “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” in the media. In this film, Maya is a pure enigma. We learn nothing about her save that she was drafted into the CIA purely to pursue bin Laden and has had no other assignments. When this task is finally completed, she is directionless, having no idea where to go from there. This is a character that is as blank as a bare wall. It’s possible this was done intentionally to avoid any direct comparisons to real persons, but it is also possible that this is a casualty of rushing the script. The screenwriter, Mark Boal (who also penned The Hurt Locker), was writing this as a commentary on the failure to find bin Laden. All that had to be scrapped at the last minute when bin Laden was found and killed. The turnover for the replacement script was a matter of a few months, and that short amount of time hurt the final film.
While Zero Dark Thirty has a lot to say about the methods utilized to ultimately find bin Laden, it doesn’t accomplish this in a way that is all that interesting to the average audience member. It gets hung up on a lot of characters that come in and out of the story all too briefly, many of whom do not have distinguishing characteristics to set them apart. On top of that, Western audiences will have trouble keeping track of who is who on the terrorist side because they are not overly familiar with how names work in that culture, and the film doesn’t handle this hurdle very well, opting instead to throw names out left and right and expect us to keep up with it all. The drama surrounding Maya and her drive to accomplish her mission by any means necessary is far more interesting than the actual missions that accomplished that.
The sole exception to this is the final mission to seize bin Laden’s compound. This mission is very well staged, and we get a good feel for many of the troops that are sent into it, including how some of them are deeply affected by what it is they are doing, especially after seeing the frightened women and children, some of whom end up as casualties. Kathryn Bigelow knows how to build up tension and stage these kinds of scenes, and it shows in the final forty-five minutes of the film. The decision to never clearly show bin Laden’s face is an interesting choice. In reality, we were never shown any images of the body of bin Laden which, much like Adolph Hitler, fueled the speculation that he was never really killed. The choice to not show his face here echoes those doubts and we are left with nothing more than Maya’s nod when she looks at his dead body to confirm that it is actually him.
Overall, this is a flawed film. It is much too long, and too many of the characters, including the lead, are nothing more than enigmas. It also has some troubling views of the use of torture (enhanced interrogation techniques) and their overall effectiveness. Certain scenes, especially the Camp Chapman attack, lose their effectiveness upon repeat viewings once we know what is coming because there is no longer the tension of the unknown. The best part is the final act and seeing how directionless Maya is once the mission is over. We leave her on a plane, the sole passenger, as she is asked where she wants to go. She never answers because this is all she has ever known in her career with the CIA, and she, herself, doesn’t know what comes next. This is an effective scene to leave the film on and the perfect note for us as an audience who have gone on this journey with her.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, and Megan Ellison
Best Actress: Jessica Chastain
Best Original Screenplay: Mark Boal
Best Film Editing: Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg
Best Sound Editing: Paul N. J. Ottosson (won)
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Release Date: December 10, 2012
Running Time: 157 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, and Joel Edgerton
Directed By: Kathryn Bigelow
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