Features > Movie Reviews > Zero Dark Thirty…

Leave aside that this hypothetical movie would never have materialized because Osama would in all likelihood still be at large. Let us suppose that by some miracle the CIA tracked down the 9/11 mastermind and that the head of al-Qaeda was indeed cut off.

In this alternate universe, surely the movie would have been directed by Michael Bay (check out the second Transformers movie for his not so subtle anti-Obama satire) and perhaps it would have starred Chuck Norris (who campaigned for Mitt Romney and promised “1000 years of darkness” if Obama was re-elected), or Clint Eastwood (who, well, you know, disastrously endorsed Romney)… In the extremely unlikely event that the movie would have centered on a hitherto unknown female CIA operative, perhaps they would have cast Lindsay Lohan, who also voiced her support for the Republican candidate on Fox News. Or maybe, like last year’s ridiculous action movie Act of Valor, they would have saved themselves the trouble of casting actors at all and instead persuaded real life military personnel to play themselves, “because no actor could duplicate what they went through.”

It’s all hypothetical of course, but one thing we can surely agree on, whatever the rightwing Bin-Laden movie would have looked like, it wouldn’t have been anything like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which is emotionally severe, lays the stress on intelligence (not action, muscle or fire-power), and which ends not with triumphalist fist-pumps or waving flags, but a nagging sense of emptiness and regret.

All this is worth bearing in mind, given how the toxic torture issue has dominated the movie’s reception, especially among the liberal intelligentsia. If you’re wondering why Kathryn Bigelow isn’t among the nominees for Best Director at the Oscars this year, this is surely the number one reason. Because I can’t think of many movies this year directed with such focus, authority and restraint.

It begins with the Twin Towers coming down – as it had to. But only to emerge in a black ops interrogation room – essentially a torture chamber, where hotshot new CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) watches and winces as her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke) bullies, berates and finally brutalizes an unresponsive al-Qaeda suspect.

The torture sequences are lengthy, detailed, hard to watch – and presumably would not have featured in the hypothetical rightwing propaganda piece we were talking about earlier – or at least, if they had, they would also have shown a more immediate linkage between the exertion of pain, and the release of actionable information. In Bigelow’s film, it is implied that Maya does become hardened to torture, but it’s also noticeable that when useful intel does come, it’s from her smart strategic thinking, not from waterboarding.

Some critics have complained that simply by showing torture the film normalizes it – but I think that’s rubbish. By omitting torture, the film would have whitewashed the US response to 9/11. As it is, Bigelow suggests what a dehumanizing process it really is, for everyone.

Bigelow has rarely, over the course of her career, focused on women as active protagonists (Blue Steel is the most notable exception). But it is significant that Maya is a woman here (Dan isn’t above using her gender to taunt the half-naked prisoner in scenes that evoke bad memories of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib), a woman in a predominantly masculine world, compelled to renounce her sexuality to get the job done. She makes a fascinating and hugely impressive character, for her resolve, conviction that borders on obsession, and her smarts, and Jessica Chastain – the fast-rising star from Tree of Life and The Help ¬– delivers one of the must-see performances of the year.

The stress is on process – in a way it’s like a police procedural or a detective story (it reminded me of David Fincher and Zodiac in particular) but played out in foreign lands and interspersed with eruptions of violence, bomb blasts that rock morale but remind everyone of the stakes. The breakthrough, when it comes, hails from technology, resources, clear analysis, and a simple, fatal mistake on the part of the terrorists. The climax – the SEALS raid – is nail-biting stuff even though we know the outcome, with exceptionally vivid nighttime photography by DP Greig Fraser.

Half past midnight in military jargon, Zero Dark Thirty traces a long, bitter journey into the darkness. This is a grimly compelling movie, one that anyone interested in how the US finally found the most wanted man on the planet can hardly fail to be engrossed by. If it also reminds us of the dirty little secrets Western governments tried to keep out of sight and out of mind, so much the better.