Zero Dark Thirty: Movie Review
Zero Dark Thirty stars Jessica Chastain as ‘Maya’. Supporting performances from Jason Clark as ‘Dan’, the CIA’s go-to torturer, and Jennifer Ehle as ‘Jessica’, a CIA operative with a competing theory on how to beat al-Qaeda. It features hundreds of interchangeable suits as Maya’s CIA bosses, an army of ‘army-guys’, and a seemingly endless number of terrorist suspects in crates. Cameo appearance by Osama bin Laden’s body double. Kathryn Bigelow directed the film from a script by Mark Boal.
Zero Dark Thirty: Title
The title uses a figurative reference. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is a military term for 30 minutes after midnight.
(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel)
Zero Dark Thirty: Logline
After 9/11, a CIA analyst spends years tracking Osama bin Laden down and must negotiate terrorist bombs, moral dilemmas and sceptical superiors to find the terrorist leader’s hiding place and persuade the government to attack it.
(For more on loglines, see The Killogator Logline Formula)
Zero Dark Thirty: Plot Summary
Warning: this summary contains spoilers
OK, so I’m guessing you already know what this one is about and how it ends, but what the hell, in case you’ve been living in a cave in Afghanistan for the last few years – they kill bin Laden at the end.
Dark Site
It’s 2003, Maya arrives in Afghanistan where Dan is torturing a prisoner into giving up the names of al-Qaeda operatives. It isn’t working, but Maya realises isolation and severe sleep deprivation means that she might be able to trick the prisoner into thinking he has cooperated and give up further information. This works and the hunt is on for a man called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who is bin Laden’s courier and might lead to the man himself.
Much ‘enhanced interrogation’ later, bombs are still going off (7/7 London attack, Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing). And then a prisoner claims Abu Ahmed died in 2001. No one is glad to hear this news, particularly as it comes hot on the heels of Jessica falling for an al-Qaeda sting and getting blown up (this scene is based on the 2009 death of CIA agent Jennifer Matthews, and six colleagues in a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan).
So, Maya and her pals are stuck. All the torture has got them nowhere, they’ve spent five years barking up the wrong tree, some of them are getting a little jaded. A CIA suit flies in to put a rocket up their butts. They’ve spent millions, taken casualties, and got nowhere. The terrorists are winning. He wants blood, preferably bin Laden’s.
The Trail
Maya has a brainwave: Abu Ahmed might not be dead! Maybe his brother died, and he’s still alive! After all, these guys all have beards—how can anyone tell them apart?
Dan bribes a Kuwaiti prince of some description with a Lamborghini (former CIA director, Jose Rodriguez denies the accuracy of this scene) and they get lucky – Abu Ahmed is a good boy and when not helping run the world’s premier terrorist organisation he keeps in touch with his dear old mum. Bingo! He’s in Peshawar, Pakistan (cue shot of red marker pen circling Peshawar on a map). The spies get overtime looking for him, but he’s a sneaky bugger always driving round in his highly conspicuous white 4×4. Slowly the CIA track him through the souks and the picturesque countryside until they find a curious-looking compound…
But they can’t tell who’s in there. The suits are nervous. The high-ups’ jowls wobble. They want to do the right thing, but is it bin Laden or just some paranoid drug dealer? It’s all a bit politically sensitive, invading Pakistan. The WMD fiasco was a major-league fuck-up they can’t afford another disaster. Maybe best they let it go? Even Dan pops back in to say it’s only a 50:50. Maya gives them all a lot of grief.
And 50:50 or not it’s a go.
The Raid
Now our spy thriller becomes a war film. We get an inter-title announcing ‘Area 51’. Woah, they’re going to use a UFO to get the big guy. Oh… no, it’s just a couple of helicopters, but they are at least stealth helicopters. The raid itself goes down pretty much as you’d imagine it from the news reports, except a lot slower and with no obvious deployment of anything resembling realistic military tactics.
And, as I said, bin Laden gets it, right between the eyes.
But it’s all been tough on poor old Maya and the film closes with her looking wistful. Without bin Laden she has nothing. She has given everything… everything!
(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis)
The Torture Thing
Right, let’s get this one out of the way first. Does Zero Dark Thirty glorify torture? I’m going with… it’s complicated.
The torture scenes that take up the first 20 minutes of the film are brutal, unflinching and leave little to the imagination. It’s difficult to see how they make torture look like anything other than what it is, degrading and a disgrace to civilisation. We see Maya herself finding the process distasteful.
So that’s 1-0 to the anti-torture team.
However, she comes round pretty quickly and is soon in there torturing with the big boys. Although, being a woman, she has thugs to head-butt her captives for her, unlike Dan who at least gets his hands dirty. She’s the heroine, so this is a definite goal for the pro-torture team.
1-1.
But the torture doesn’t work. Maya has to trick the prisoner into giving up bin Laden’s courier. The al-Qaeda operatives try to avoid being tortured by (technical term) making shit up. The leads from torture go nowhere. The breaks in the case actually come from:
- Maya spotting overlooked intelligence supplied by the Jordanians
- Bribery
- Signals intelligence
2-1.
Maya, Dan and the rest of the CIA seem to be upset that they can’t torture people any more after President Obama gets in. Dan seems at a loss about how he’s ever going to get any usable intelligence ever again. How the police ever get anyone to confess must be a mystery to him.
2-2.
It’s a draw.
The Critique of Torture
Zero Dark Thirty provides no endorsement of the (long discredited) idea that the CIA was not engaged in torture. It supplies some support to the theory that torture is unpleasant but it works, but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement.
The movie touches on the practical critique of torture, that it doesn’t work because it just ends up with the victims saying anything they can think of to make it stop, and then you waste resources following up all the spurious leads. A movie could explore that argument more, but not if it wants to tell this story. The film is two-and-a-half hours long already. Even so, it’s compressed and in places confusing, with a lot of inter-titles trying to explain where the hell we are now.
From my writer’s perspective, though, the film could simply have started later, after the torture, and been half an hour shorter. A short opening scene where someone just gives Maya the courier’s name and we could segue straight to what is in the actual film: the second act. Clearly, the writer intended to explore the issue. I’d say he was in two minds about what point he wanted to make. It would have been very easy to lead the viewer by simply placing an unattractive ‘evil’ character on one side of the divide or the other. As the screenplay doesn’t do that, the way you view torture is unlikely to change after you see the film. If it’s propaganda, it’s extremely subtle.
Analysis
Drama
The film is long, discursive, and there are lots and lots of characters. Unfortunately, apart from Maya and Dan (and Dan practically disappears in the second half) few of them have much chance to make an impression on the viewer. This is the peril of semi-documentary: in reality, single individuals are not present as the entire story unfolds. Even compressing and using composite characters, the true story of the hunt for bin Laden simply requires more personnel than the viewer can keep track of. As it is, Maya and Dan seem to be in an unfeasibly large number of places at the right time.
The climax of the film is really the go-no-go decision. The actual raid is not particularly well done. The tension evaporates, because we know what’s going to happen and it happens too slowly. I might even have been tempted to stay with Maya’s point of view during the raid (she’s back in Afghanistan waiting to identify the body). The final lurch from espionage thriller to war film is stylistically difficult, and not helped by the fact that the helicopters have more personality than the soldiers, who simply don’t get enough screen time to establish themselves as individuals.
Realism
Mark Boal also wrote The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty is very similar in its semi-documentary style. This has advantages and disadvantages. Being ‘a true story’ means the viewer will allow the writer to get away with things that they wouldn’t in a fictional film (the incessant expository inter-titles, for example).
There are various minor quibbles with the realism of the film, the search and the raid are both known to have been substantially more complicated than shown on film, but this is very much the official story, and neither the CIA nor the US military will have compromised any secrets in facilitating its making. If you want to know in precise detail what happened, you’d be better off reading a book. In the end, the viewer should remember that despite the documentary feel, this is not actually a true story, just a loose interpretation based on biased sources.
Zero Dark Thirty: Alternative Movie Poster
This is my design for an alternate, more minimalist Zero Dark Thirty poster. I based the tagline on something Dan says to one of his prisoners: “This is what defeat looks like, bro. Your jihad is over.” Click the image to see more of my alternative spy thriller posters.
Zero Dark Thirty: My Verdict
Mixed. There are some impressive scenes. The tracking of the courier through the Islamabad souk, for example, is excellent drama. The movie ratchets the tension as high as possible considering we know what’s going to happen. Jessica Chastain gives a fine performance. But the supposed climax of the film, the raid on bin Laden’s compound, is actually a bit of a dramatic fizzle. And well, you know, there’s the torture thing…
Want to watch it?
The trailer is here:
Zero Dark Thirty is available on Amazon here and Amazon UK here.
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