Zero Dark Thirty

I love most old people because if you actually listen to them they more often than not have some pretty cool stories to tell. Sometimes you get tales of their weekend flings with John Denver (friend’s mom), dangerous encounters with bigots in Vidor, Texas  in which they end up flipping people off and generally scaring every racist in the restaurant (my mom), or you get the couple who spent one weekend chasing down a little boy and his imaginary friend trying to kidnap him (Cloak and Dagger). But then you also the old people that you are just waiting for them to die so that the world can be a better place; such as old rednecks who hate inter racial marriage, Bill O’Reilly,  Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders (R.I.P. AL), Mr Burns, or basically everyone who is a part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Every year they pick the 5 or 10 most boring and or serious movies they can find to nominate for best picture. Now don’t get me wrong, most of them are legitimate choices but then you always have that 30% that are just thrown in because it’s full of old people doing lame,  boring, and insignificant things like rediscovering love at the age of 98, or taking a road trip on a tractor, or seeing Kathy Bates naked in a hot tub! They select these films because it reminds them of their boring lives and makes them feel like they still matter in the world when in reality they’re like Martin Landeau’s character in Entourage “Is that something you might be interested in?”. 

Well in this case they were right to buy into the hype that was building up Zero Dark Thirty because Kathryn Bigelow stays on a hot streak with her latest effort about the greatest manhunt in the history of the world (to borrow the movie’s tag line).  And good for Bigelow because she has been able to buck this trend of inconsistency that has plagued her career. She will give you classics like Near Dark and Pointe Break but then will follow those up with efforts like Blue Steel and The Widowmaker. She has a knack for filming some great action scenes and this makes you wish that she would just direct a straight up action flick but honestly I am ok with the army procedural or character study with just enough action in it to keep you engaged. 

In Zero Dark Thirty she takes  you into the decade long search for the head of Al Qaeda and 9-11 conspirator Osama bin Laden. The first 15-20 minutes is quite possibly the most memorable part of the movie and it is solely responsible for all of the controversy surrounding Bigelow’s display of what she calls first hand encounters of actual events. Now every one who claims that this movie is pro torture clearly either didn’t see the movie or must have been too busy chomping on their popcorn to realize what was happening on screen. She goes out of her way to show that she is not making a personal statement of any kind in regards to torture. She could have hammed it up by adding music over the scenes while portraying the detainees as super evil villains or purposefully drawn at your heart strings with extended unnecessary beatings but she didn’t. She simply shows you what took place during the interrogation and it makes you feel uncomfortable the entire time because on one hand you want them to get the information to save lives by any means necessary but then you also realize that it’s a human being that’s being hurt. And hence the dilemma.

After this the movie belongs to Jessica Chastain who plays the role of Maya, the CIA operative who was recruited out of high school and spends her entire career chasing after bin Laden. You get clear insight into her obsession over this mission when at a “casual” dinner with co worker and friend Jennifer (Ehle) she seems exasperated at the mere suggestion of her taking a break or two to hook up with her pseudo mentor in Dan who is played wonderfully by Jason Clarke. You may remember his career turning role in Death Race. Chastain has this gradual and believable metamorphosis into this bad ass as she becomes more and more desensitized to the torture tactics that are being utilized and increasingly frustrated with all of the red tape and apparent dead ends that she encounters in this global search for the world’s most hated man; unlike Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight but that’s another discussion for another time. She is also the only one who believes in her theory that tracking down bin Laden’s courier will ultimately lead to Osama himself. 

You as a viewer start to get frustrated along with Maya as Bigelow does a wonderful job of giving you a feel  for the amount of exhaustive efforts that were put into this manhunt but not at the expense of making you feel like you’ve been in the theater for 10 hours. And just when you think that there is no end to this search, she finally takes you into the infiltration of bin Laden’s compound. Now even though you may know what happened from watching the news or reading CNN, it doesn’t matter. It’s like reading a book and finally getting tosee what you’ve always pictured in your head happening right before you. All the action feels real and once again she shoots it straight so you can come up with your thoughts on how you should feel about what happened when the task force went in to kill him. 

Overall I rate this movie as pretty TIGHT. If for nothing else the children singing falsetto in the trailer while people run around with guns!  How can this not pump you up? It makes you want to go to a Catholic church right before playing a pick up basketball game or drafting your fantasy football team! go see it and force the idiot Academy to pick this or Django for best Picture.