Dinesh Kamath's column on Hollywood film 'Zero Dark Thirty' that was published in Newsband

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!