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. Fea­tur­ing 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. The film was dir­ec­ted by Kath­ryn Bigelow from a script by Mark Boal.

And in case you’re won­der­ing what Zero Dark Thirty means, it’s a mil­it­ary term for 30 minutes after midnight.

Warn­ing: this review con­tains spoil­ers

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.

Zero Dark Thirty: Plot Summary

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.

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 mean that the pris­oner might be tricked 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.

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 (the accur­acy of this scene has been denied by former CIA dir­ector, Jose Rodrig­uez) 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.

Now our spy thriller becomes a war film. We get an inter­title 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!

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 don’t leave much 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. Maya her­self is seen 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 mak­ing shit up (tech­nical term). The leads from tor­ture go nowhere. The breaks in the case come first from Maya spot­ting over­looked intel­li­gence sup­plied by the Jord­ani­ans, second bribery and third 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.

Zero Dark Thirty provides no endorse­ment of the (long dis­cred­ited) idea that the CIA was not engaged in tor­ture. It does sup­ply some sup­port to the the­ory that tor­ture is unpleas­ant but it works, but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

The prac­tical cri­tique of tor­ture, that it doesn’t work because it just ends up with the vic­tims say­ing any­thing to make it stop, and then resources are wasted fol­low­ing up all the spuri­ous leads, is touched on. That argu­ment could be explored more in a film, but not one that wants to tell this story. The film is two and a half hours long already. It is still com­pressed and in places con­fus­ing, with a lot of inter­titles 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 versus 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 inter­titles for example).

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 whole 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.

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, neither the CIA nor the US mil­it­ary will have com­prom­ised any secrets in facil­it­at­ing its mak­ing. But if you want to know in pre­cise detail what happened then you’d be bet­ter 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. The tagline is based 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 great scenes. The track­ing of the cour­ier through the Islamabad souk for example is excel­lent drama. The ten­sion is rat­cheted 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:

Agree? Disagree?

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