Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.
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37 films that influenced Zero Dark Thirty
What critics say influenced Zero Dark Thirty
But don’t expect a fast-paced historic reenactment akin to All the President’s Men .
The also torn-from-the-headlines "All the President's Men" did something similar, but a difference is that "Zero Dark Thirty" is punctuated at seemingly regular intervals with outbursts of violence, to remind the viewer what's at stake; also interrupting the satellite-enhanced ratiocination are a few intricate suspense set pieces.
But that’s what’s so remarkable about Zero Dark Thirty, recalling another film where our knowledge of its outcome rendered the narrative no less compelling: All the President’s Men, where the process becomes the story.
In that sense, her film resembles Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) with the key difference being that, in the latter, the characters all feel like fully rounded, lived-in human characters rather than connect-the-dots archetypes.
The film boasts a storytelling efficiency formerly reserved for classics like All the President’s Men and Chinatown .
With Chastain’s single-minded obsession as the through-line, Zero Dark Thirty takes the reliable form of procedurals like All The President’s Men and Zodiac , staying doggedly on the investigative path while keeping the political and cultural aspects of the case at arm’s length.
In more precise terms, Bigelow’s ability to dramatize modern history known to many but only truly understood by a precious few mirrors the surreal quality of Paul Greengrass’ “United 93,” which also managed to transform traumatic history into cinematic narrative.
The movie's most obvious thematic benchmarks are United 93 and Black Hawk Down , whose respective solemnity and gritty, jostling military subjectivity are both evoked in fitful flashes.
The one piece of affirmative dialogue (“Geronimo”) arrives as matter-of-factly as “Let’s roll” in Paul Greengrass’ excellent United 93 , blessedly free of any impulse to underline heroic action.
Bigelow and Boal take a similar approach as Paul Greengrass’ “United 93” in terms of creating a movie that feels real every step of the way despite having known actors.
And the calendar: even more so than with Paul Greengrass' United 93 , it's fair to suggest that the Hollywood treatment of such politically delicate—and, in this case, covert—recent history comes "too soon," and lacking in the crucial historical perspective that comes with time.
The film I find myself comparing it most to is United 93.
The film recalls what President Woodrow Wilson reportedly said after screening D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: "It's like history written with lightning."
Mostly, though, the recent film that Zero Dark Thirty chiefly recalls is David Fincher's Zodiac , an exhaustively methodical overview of the years-long hunt for the same-named serial killer who stalked the San Francisco Bay area during the late 1960s and early '70s.
For the majority of its running time, Zero Dark Thirty plays out as a scalpel-sharp, forensic procedural (think David Fincher's Zodiac ).
"Zero Dark Thirty," with its focus on the CIA manhunt for Bin Laden, is a closer cousin to David Fincher's "Zodiac."
The most accomplished procedural since David Fincher‘s superb Zodiac, gifted with an esteemed, oddball ensemble cast anchored by a career-best Jessica Chastain.
Maya is as consumed with finding bin Laden as Jake Gyllenhaal was obsessed with finding a serial killer in Zodiac, only he was doing it as a hobby.
With Chastain’s single-minded obsession as the through-line, Zero Dark Thirty takes the reliable form of procedurals like All The President’s Men and Zodiac , staying doggedly on the investigative path while keeping the political and cultural aspects of the case at arm’s length.
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And perhaps only then and after an extended period of time will we be able to decide if Zero Dark Thirty is closer in spirit to The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) or Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935).
The ambivalence and perspective and distinctive vision we get in all memorable films about war and espionage and violence, from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to The Battle of Algiers (1965) to Waltz with Bashir (2008), is totally absent, leaving only the procession of facts (and unmarked prevarications), from the harrowing 9/11 emergency phone-call recordings to the final dead-body shots.
In years past, great incendiary European directors like Costa-Gavras ("Z") and Gillo Pontecorvo ("The Battle of Algiers") created stirring, fiercely partisan films, and Oliver Stone ("JFK") offered polemics from Hollywood.
But to Bigelow and Boal’s credit, their lightning-rod opening scenes are as matter of fact as imaginable, their frankness evoking the comparable scenes of hardheartedness depicted nearly 50 years ago in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat .
And perhaps only then and after an extended period of time will we be able to decide if Zero Dark Thirty is closer in spirit to The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) or Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935).
In a movie long on detail but short on humanity, the final third, the assault on the Abbottabad compound, where bin Laden spent his final years, sharing with operatives’ families and a haul of VHS tapes (including the United States’ copy of Teen Wolf), is almost light relief.
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Nor does it deny that it was used by the US under the double-speak terminology of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and as Alex Gibney demonstrated in his 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, never officially sanctioned but ambiguously endorsed to prevent anybody too important ever being held accountable.
In an article in Salon , documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney -- whose great "Taxi to the Dark Side" (2007) examined U.S. "War on Terror" torture practices in great detail -- wrote that "Zero Dark Thirty" is "reckless" and "indefensible."
The other narrative is from political commentators like The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer (author of the 2008 book The Dark Side, on the legal justifications and possible criminality of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation techniques), Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who made Taxi to the Dark Side, and CNN’s Peter Bergen, who wrote Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.
The last time such a device was used to evoke that tragic day without relying on explicit images of burning buildings was Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which utilized reaction shots to underscore the human element of the devastation.