Movie review: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ seeks complex story behind the headlines
If “Zero Dark Thirty” were merely an action thriller, it would be remarkable in that even though the whole world knows the deadly outcome, it’s still incredibly suspenseful. But as director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s gripping, journalistic narrative about the long, grueling hunt for 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden is so much more than a macho exercise in revenge mythology, it’s all the more significant.
With its astute blending of shoe-leather journalism, potboiler politics, police procedural, personal psychodrama and high-octane action thriller, it’s one of the most riveting, debate provoking and entertainingly ripped-from-the-headlines movies to come along since “All the President’s Men.”
“Zero Dark Thirty” (military jargon for half-past midnight, the launch time of the SEAL Team Six raid) is framed by two stark scenarios – opening with an horrific aural evocation of Sept. 11 (static radio chatter and panicked cries of help from the stricken Twin Towers) and ending with the calculated, clinical SEAL strike on bin Laden’s austere compound in Abbottabad.
In between, Boal’s exhaustive reporting loads the story with arcane ins and outs of counter-terrorist technique, as well as political infighting, internal CIA debates and numerous dead ends and setbacks encountered along the way. There are dispiriting tragedies (the 2008 bombing of the Marriott Islamabad in Pakistan and the 2009 suicide attack on Afghanistan’s Camp Chapman that killed seven CIA operatives). There are nifty bits of techno wizardry (like triangulating a cell phone signal amid the teeming populace of urban Pakistan to track down a bin Laden courier). And there are the harrowing but non-judgmental depictions of “enhanced interrogation” (read that: torture) by American ops – personified most chillingly by Jason Clarke as brainy CIA jock Dan – that have already fired up harsh partisan debate.
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