Zero Dark Thirty Review

Zero Dark Thirty is described as a chronicle of the decade long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, until his death at the hands of the United States Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. Kathryn Bigelow, who won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Hurt Locker, directs this film. The Hurt Locker is the best film about the Iraq War, so I was curious if she could make another good war film.

Zero Dark Thirty really does not have a plot. The movie feels so episodic as scenes are just chopped together. The movie consists of scenes that involve torture of prisoners, bombings, agents stalking suspects in large Pakistani crowds, people staring at computer screens, and characters yelling at each other because they cannot find Bin Laden. These scenes go on for about two hours. The most boring parts of this movie are the office scenes where there is so much talking with no tension.

The closest thing we have to a main character is Maya (Jessica Chastain). She, along with everyone else in the film, has no backstory and no character arcs. All we know about Maya is that the CIA recruited her out of high school, and that she is obsessed with finding Bin Laden. Her character is so robotic and dull that I wonder how Chastain is getting so much praise for the role.

On a technical level the film is great. The actual scene of the Navy SEAL Team 6 raiding Bin Laden’s hiding spot is very well done. This scene is so tense, and it is filmed so professionally that it actually looks like real live footage from that mission. The torture scenes in the beginning can be tough to watch, but they really capture the grittiness of the film. I thought the grittiness was going to be carried throughout the whole film, but it didn’t.

Zero Dark Thirty plays out like a companion piece to The Hurt Locker. Of course, the latter was a much better film with characters we cared about. Zero Dark Thirty is a fine piece of filmmaking, but I think it would have worked better as a miniseries. In my honest opinion, it's basically an extended episode of Homeland.

Zero Dark Thirty - 3.5/5