Zero Dark Thirty
starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Edgar Ramirez and James Gandolfini
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
This is the story of the hunt for terrorism leader Osama Bin Laden and his eventual discovery and killing in a quick, stealth, night time helicopter raid by U.S. Navy SEALs on a fortified roadside compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan 110 km north of the capital, Islamabad. It’s set overwhelmingly in Pakistan, starting in 2004 and finishes in May 2011. Some additional scenes take place in Afghanistan, Langley, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The film is heavy on CIA intelligence work, a little graphic abuse of Al Qaida prisoners, lots of American “protect the homeland against those bastards” dialogue, plus dusty, crowded Pakistani streets. It feels hot and noisy even though you will watch it from the comfort of your own living room, with snacks, drinks and a nearby bathroom. In the final, dramatic scenes although we do see some gunplay we do not see any look-alike actor playing the bad man himself resisting fiercely because the story is about the intelligence work leading to his killing and not about the operation itself. In fact, as with the death of anything scary and bad - from a cockroach in your kitchen to Hitler, Hussein, or Osama - when the end comes it’s interesting how small the thing actually is when it is lying dead on the ground in front of you.
We all remember the news. And the photo of U.S. President Barak Obama seated with a group of White House staff intensely watching the raid live on military satellite feeds. The Democratic President claimed success for what the Republican President George Bush started, and then went on to enjoy re-election a year-and-a-half later. Many in the West had little but disgust for the incompetence of the Pakistanis and what looked like their complicity. There was a Pakistan Military Academy just down the road for crying out loud! The U.S. government launched their raid with only 60% confidence that Bin Laden was actually there, which is pretty good under the circumstances. They also made their decision and took their action with neither the participation nor the permission of the Pakistan government. So what. It didn’t look bad to me or to the American public. We all agree that Pakistan is one fucked up country.
American children who couldn’t even remember the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York City and other targets and who grew up with Osama Bin Laden as this familiar face, hated target and bogey man witnessed history they couldn’t comprehend. For many of it was a kind of
closure. From Tokyo I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center on live television. Still tired from jetlag from our last family trip to Canada (in which we ransited through the United States) my wife was too tired to get out of her futon to watch with me. I don’t much care for U.S. foreign policy which American don’t like to discuss but which, honestly, precipitated Al Qaida’s terrorism in the first place. But I was very satisfied with American action in this case.
Kathryn Bigelow won the 2009 Best Picture Academy Award for her 2008 film The Hurt Locker, starring Jeremy Renner, about a U.S. Army bomb disposal squad in Bagdad. It beat her ex-husband James Cameron’s 3-D computer graphic blockbuster, Avatar, which I thought was undeserved because I thought The Hurt Locker was a piece of crap. But Zero Dark Thirty was excellent and intense.