Zero Dark Thirty

Initially when the movie was over I said that I liked it.  And overall I guess I still do.  But the more I thought about it and the more I discussed it with others a lot of flaws started to appear.  “The greatest manhunt in history” turned out to be kind of less interesting than I thought it would be.

Let’s start with Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life) who plays Maya.  I thought she was good until she has an outburst with her boss and suddenly everything Chastain was doing seemed very contrived.  This is an extremely pouty performance and I was fed up with this character about half way through.  And this has nothing to do with Maya being a strong female.  I’m all for that but why the fuck is she acting like a child?  This person is supposed to be a fairly high ranked CIA operative which means she’s gonna follow the chain of command.  She’s not gonna throw a tantrum or write on her boss’s door every day the number of days of inactivity it’s been since bin Laden’s compound was found.  Be a fucking professional lady.  And the part at the end where she cries was really forced.  As it was pointed out to me, if this character had been a man they sure as shit wouldn’t have had him cry at the conclusion of this operation.  All we know about Maya is that she’s tenacious and has to have her way.  She wants to find and kill bin Laden and that’s it.  We don’t know anything else about her except for the inadvertently comedic line where she mentions that she was recruited by the CIA out of high school (I don’t care if the CIA really does do that, it just sounds stupid).  Now that I think about it this fact could explain her unprofessional behavior.  My point is this protagonist is pretty one dimensional and that was disappointing.

What was also disappointing was the manhunt itself, which is most of the movie.  I think they started too far back in time.  I totally understand that 9/11 needs to be in there because, after all, this is the reason why we wanted bin Laden’s head on a platter.  But I think you could start the story with discovering the compound or possibly with the courier stuff.  Everything else before that could’ve been summed up either in text or narration before the film beings proper.  If you want to show some torture, I get it, go for it.  But there is just a lot of very little going on until the compound is found.  However, I could see an argument being made that the length of the movie mimics the length of the manhunt and how long and difficult it was to find bin Laden.  That’s a fair point.

The raid on the compound was excellent though and by far the best part of the movie.  I love how it was cut and dry with no music or very fancy camera work.  It felt more like a documentary at that point, like Kathryn Bigelow had somehow gone back in time and sent a camera crew with Seal Team 6 on their mission.  And even though I knew how it was all going to play out the adrenaline was pumping and I couldn’t wait to see what was around the next corner.  It was such a smart choice to have the death of bin Laden be relatively uneventful too.  The Seals kill a bunch of dudes and then one of them over the radio says they may have him but they’re not totally certain.  There’s no slow-mo shot or musical cue or anything.  Beautifully done.

I have to admit that the raid is a damn good payoff.  But at the same time it should’ve been the second half of the film.  I mean I was really let down that we don’t get to know Seal Team 6.  I still cared about them and didn’t want to see them get hurt regardless but we’re not told a single thing about them here.  I was expecting a montage of these dudes getting handpicked for the job after doing some impressive Seal type shit.

And that may sound too much like an action movie cliché but it became clear after a little while that this wasn’t some lofty, formula free, extremely realistic flick.  That’s what I thought it was supposed to be with all of this talk about the filmmakers working with the CIA and getting access to privileged information ‘n shit.  Turns out the director of the CIA said that this thing took significant artistic license and that it’s “not a realistic portrayal of the facts”.  So here’s my beef, Bigelow and co. dramatized and made shit up but still crafted a picture that’s mostly kinda boring.  And the original script was written before we found and killed bin Laden.  The raid was added after the fact.  Goddamn, we would’ve gotten such a dull movie if it was just about the manhunt and there was no raid finale. 

Before I checked this out I was surprised, like the rest of the world, when Bigelow wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for best director this year.  And even though I think the Academy Awards are all bullshit and politics anyway, I can see why they didn’t give her a nomination.  The cinematography and the production design are great but the script and the lead actress are not.  Some of the dialogue in particular is really bad and I had a bunch of examples but I can’t remember them now.  Although, it was pretty cool when that CIA guy yells “bring me people to kill!”

The main problem here is the script.  It’s not tight enough and was way more movie-ish (if you know what I mean) than I was expecting.  There are too many unnecessary details and flat characters.  The story focuses too much on Maya which doesn’t feel right.  I don’t care about her.  I want to know about the team that had to train and execute the raid.  It might have been nice to get some background on bin Laden too ‘cause they don’t tell you shit about him in this.  He’s portrayed purely as a boogeyman like he was in real life.  But I’m not sure how well that would’ve fit, just thinking out loud.  Anyway, it seems like everything leading up to the compound part wasn’t crazy or unbelievable.  That shit unfolded in an uninteresting way.  But how we deciphered that bin Laden was staying at the compound and the actual revenge part where he gets shot in the fucking eye was the good shit.  That’s your story. 

This ain’t no Hurt Locker.  That was really entertaining but also really informative.  Zero Dark Thirty doles out the info in a stiff manner which makes it harder to absorb.  But then again, you’re apparently being misinformed anyway.  As a movie this isn’t bad but it’s not great either.

And if you take a step back this is classic Bigelow really.  Her films are pretty hit or miss.  Since The Hurt Locker was good she won’t have a good one again for another one or two movies.  I liked Near Dark better than this but they’re similar in that they both have one incredible segment out of an otherwise, honestly, forgettable picture.  Bigelow can definitely make some magic happen; she’s just not very consistent.

Zero Dark Thirty

Near Dark