Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American
historical drama film directed by Kathryn
Bigelow and written by Mark Boal.
Billed as "the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most
dangerous man," the film is a dramatization of the United States operation that found
and killed Osama bin Laden, leader
of al-Qaeda. It was produced by Boal,
Bigelow, and Megan Ellison.
It stars Jessica
Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong,
Kyle Chandler, and Édgar Ramírez.
It was independently financed by Ellison's
Annapurna Pictures.
Zero Dark Thirty received wide critical
acclaim and was nominated for five Academy Awards for the 85th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Jessica Chastain) and Best Original
Screenplay. Zero Dark Thirty earned four Golden Globe Award nominations,
including Best Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Actress – Drama for
Chastain, which she won.
It has also generated controversy, both for graphic
portrayal of torture of suspects and for what is described by some as a
misleading portrayal of torture as critical to the United States ' success in gaining
information on bin Laden's associates
and location. In addition, Republicans suggested that the filmmakers were given
improper access to classified materials, which they and the Obama administration denied.
The movie has an interesting plot. In 2003, Maya, a young CIA officer, has spent her
entire brief career, since she graduated from high school, focusing solely on
intelligence related to Osama bin Laden,
leader of al-Qaeda, following the terrorist organization's September 11 attacks
in the United States .
She has just been reassigned to the U.S.
embassy in Pakistan
to work with a fellow officer, Dan.
During the first months of her assignment, Maya
often accompanies Dan to a black site
for his continuing interrogation of Ammar,
a detainee with suspected links to several Saudi terrorists. Dan subjects the detainee to torture,
including waterboarding, and humiliation. He and Maya eventually trick Ammar
into divulging that an old acquaintance, who is using the alias 'Abu Ahmed', is working as a personal
courier for bin Laden. Other
detainees corroborate this, with some claiming Abu Ahmed delivers messages between bin Laden and a man referred to as Abu Faraj. In mid-2005, Abu
Faraj is apprehended by the CIA and local police in Pakistan . Maya interrogates Abu Faraj
under torture, but he continues to deny knowing a courier with such a name. Maya interprets this as Abu Faraj's trying to conceal the importance
of Abu Ahmed.
The film shows how Maya develops from a freshman into a veteran officer while
portraying how the analysts must sift through masses of data and information,
using a variety of technology, hunches and sharing insights. Displaying the zeal
and frustrations of a 'single-tasker', she concentrates on finding Abu Ahmed, determined to use him to find
bin Laden. During a span of five
years, she survives the 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing as well as being
shot at in her car by armed men. Dan,
departing on re-assignment, warns Maya
about a possible change in politics, suggesting that the new administration may
prosecute those officers who had been involved in torture. Maya's fellow officer and friend Jessica is killed in the 2009 Camp Chapman
attack. A Jordanian detainee claims the man previously identified as Abu Ahmed, from a photograph, is a man
he personally buried in 2001. Several CIA officers— Maya's seniors — conclude the target who could be Abu Ahmed is long dead, and that they
have searched a false trail for nine years.
A fellow analyst researching Moroccan intelligence
archives comes to Maya and suggests
that Abu Ahmed is 'Ibrahim Sayeed'. Maya agrees and
contacts Dan, who is working at the
CIA headquarters. Maya has found that
Ibrahim Sayeed had a brother, Habib,
and theorizes the CIA's supposed photograph of Abu Ahmed was of Habib.
He bore a striking resemblance to Ibrahim
and was killed in Afghanistan .
Dan uses CIA funds to purchase
a Lamborghini for a Kuwaiti prince in exchange for the telephone number of Sayeed's mother. The CIA traces calls to
the mother, and one caller's persistent use of tradecraft to avoid detection
leads Maya to conclude the caller is Abu Ahmed. (Computer-aided voice
recognition analysis is shown, among the many technologies.) At Maya's behest and with the support of
her supervisors, numerous CIA operatives are deployed to search for and
identify Abu Ahmed; they locate him
in his vehicle and eventually track him to a large urban compound in Abbottabad , Pakistan ,
near the national military academy.
The CIA puts the compound under heavy surveillance
for several months, using a variety of methods, but cannot prove bin Laden is there. Meanwhile, the
President's National Security Advisor tasks the CIA with producing a plan to
capture or kill bin Laden if it can
be confirmed that he is in the compound. An agency team devises a plan to use
two top-secret stealth helicopters (developed at Area 51) flown by the Army's
160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to secretly enter Pakistan and insert a U.S. Navy
SEAL team to raid the compound. Before briefing U.S. President Obama, the CIA Director (presumed to be Leon Panetta, though never explicitly
named) holds a meeting of his top officials, who assess only a 60-80% chance
that bin Laden is living in the
compound, rather than another high-value target. (Maya, also in attendance, asserts the chances are 100%.)
The raid is approved by President Obama and is executed on May 2, 2011. Although execution
is complicated by one of the helicopters crashing (and rousing the
neighborhood), the US
has backup and the SEALs kill a man on the compound's top floor who is revealed
to be bin Laden. (They also kill
other men and a woman in the course of the raid). They bring bin Laden's body back to a U.S. base in Jalalabad , Afghanistan ,
where Maya and other CIA and military
officers wait. She views the body and visually confirms it is bin Laden. Maya is last seen boarding a
military C-130 to return to the US
and sitting in its vast interior as its only passenger. The pilot asks her
where she wants to go but she doesn't reply and instead starts crying,
realising now that although her hunt for bin
Laden has been successful, all direction in her life has been lost.
The film has Jessica
Chastain as Maya, Jason Clarke as Dan, Joel Edgerton as Patrick, Red Squadron Team Leader, Mark Strong as George, Jennifer Ehle as
Jessica, Kyle Chandler as Joseph
Bradley, CIA Islamabad Station Chief, Chris
Pratt as Justin, a U.S. Navy SEAL,
Taylor Kinney as Jared, a U.S. Navy SEAL, Édgar Ramírez as Larry, a CIA Special Activities Division officer, Mark Duplass as Steve, a CIA analyst, Frank
Grillo as the Red Squadron Commanding officer, Stephen Dillane as the National Security Advisor, Fares Fares as Hakim, a CIA Special Activities Division officer, Harold Perrineau as Jack, Reda Kateb as Ammar, James Gandolfini as CIA Director Leon Panetta, Fredric Lehne as The Wolf,
Scott Adkins as John, Mark Valley as
C-130 pilot, Ricky Sekhon as Osama bin Laden, John Barrowman as Jeremy
and Christopher Stanley as Admiral Bill McRraven.
The film has been met with wide acclaim from film
critics, currently holding a 93% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 229 reviews
and an average rating of 8.6/10, as well as a score of 95 on Metacritic based on 36 reviews. It is
the best-reviewed film of 2012 according to Metacritic.
Reviewing the film, Times critic Manohla Dargis
said Zero
Dark Thirty "shows the dark side of that war. It shows the
unspeakable and lets us decide if the death of Bin Laden was worth the price we paid." Continued Dargis: "There is much else to say
about the movie, which ends with the harrowing siege of Bin Laden’s hideaway by the Navy SEALs (played by, among others, Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt), much of it shot to approximate the queasy, weirdly
unreal green of night-vision goggles. Ms.
Bigelow’s direction here is unexpectedly stunning, at once bold and
intimate: she has a genius for infusing even large-scale action set pieces with
the human element. One of the most significant images is of a pool of blood on
a floor. It’s pitiful, really, and as the movie heads toward its emphatically
non-triumphant finish, it is impossible not to realize with anguish that all
that came before — the pain, the suffering and the compromised ideals — has led
to this." Dargis designated the
film as The New York Times critics'
pick.
Richard
Corliss'
review in Time magazine called it
"a fine" movie and "a police procedural on the grand
scale," saying it "blows Argo out of the water." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter said, "it could well be the most
impressive film Bigelow has made, as
well as possibly her most personal." Peter
Debruge of Variety said:
"The ultra-professional result may be easier to respect than enjoy, but
there's no denying its power." Critic Katey
Rich of The Guardian said:
"Telling a nearly three-hour story with an ending everyone knows, Bigelow and Boal have managed to craft one of the most intense and
intellectually challenging films of the year." Calling Zero
Dark Thirty "a milestone in post-Sept. 11 cinema," critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times listed the film at number six of the top 10
films of 2012.
Writing in The
New Yorker, film critic David Denby
lauded the filmmakers for their approach. "The virtue of Zero
Dark Thirty," wrote Denby,
"is that it pays close attention to the way life does work; it combines
ruthlessness and humanity in a manner that is paradoxical and disconcerting yet
satisfying as art." But Denby
faulted the filmmakers for getting lodged on the divide between fact and
fiction.
"Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream
movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the
filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a
sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the
information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do
such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without
flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage
the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow
and Boal — the team behind The Hurt Locker — want to claim the
authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the
contradiction mars an ambitious project."
Steve Coll criticized the early claims
for "journalism" with the use of composite characters. He took issue
with the film's using the names of historical figures and details of their
lives for characters, such as using details for "Ammar" to suggest that he was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, whose nom de guerre was Ammar al-Baluchi. Coll
said the facts about him were different than portrayed in the film, which
suggests the detainee will never leave the black site. Al-Baluchi was transferred to Guantanamo
in 2006 for a military tribunal.
Coll writes, "He has been an
active, defiant participant in Guantánamo court proceedings and his lawyers
have sought permission from military judges to introduce evidence in his
defense that he was tortured while in CIA custody, and to pursue information
about the identities of the agency officers who interrogated him."
The Washington
Post's
critic Ann Hornaday, who named Zero
Dark Thirty as the year's best film, noted the divergent takes on the
film: "As Boal and Bigelow gather critics’ plaudits and
awards, the movie itself has entered a fascinating parallel conversation – part
food fight for cable-news channels desperate for post-election fodder, part
valuable (if belated) civic debate." Writing in the Los Angeles
Times, critic Kenneth Turan
singled out actress Chastain for her
performance. "Her single-minded ferocity and stubbornness not only prove
essential in the hunt, but also make up the emotional through line that engages
us in the story of Zero Dark Thirty."
Writing in The
Wall Street Journal, film critic Joe
Morgenstern said: "This is the work of a commanding filmmaker who is
willing, as well as able, to confront a full spectrum of moral ambiguity."
After noting the controversy, he wrote: "Others will debate the facts, but
I can tell you that Zero Dark Thirty does not apologize for torture, any more than
it denounces it. What it does in the course of telling a seminal story of our
time is what contemporary films so rarely do, serve as brilliant
provocation."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four. He said: "The
film's opening scenes are not great filmmaking. They're heavy on jargon and
impenetrable calculation, murky and heavy on theory." He went on, "My
guess is that much of the fascination with this film is inspired by the
unveiling of facts, unclearly seen. There isn't a whole lot of plot —
basically, just that Maya thinks she
is right, and she is."
David
Edelstein
said that "[a]s a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline
fascistic", but "[a]s a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping –
an unholy masterwork." The journalist Matt
Taibbi wrote: "The real problem is what this movie says about us. When
those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America
was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin)
was that this wasn't who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years
later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we've become
so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and
other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of
it."
Thus Zero Dark Thirty is a great film. Do
watch it! Don’t miss it!
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