This has to be said before anything else: only the most ridiculously zealous, thoroughly indoctrinated American citizen could possibly walk out of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" or manifesting some other form of national pride in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was tracked down and killed. There is no Michael-Bay-style-slow-motion take accompanying the SEAL 6 team onto their stealth helicopters. There is no heroic, muscular Hans Zimmer music accompanying the raid on the Abottabad complex. There is no sweeping dramatic score when Maya, the Central Intelligence Agency played with a fierce sense of commitment by Jessica Chastain, opens the body bag containing bin Laden's body and identifies him.
Zero Dark Thirty is an ugly, unapologetic, and unflinching movie that purports to give an account of the hunt for and eventual extermination of America's most wanted terrorist leader. It begins with a blacked-out screen in 2001, and audio captures of actual people caught in the tumult of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, after which it segues immediately to 2003, to an undisclosed location in Pakistan where CIA Agent Dan (Jason Clarke) is busy torturing Ammar (Reda Kateb) a member of the Al-Qaeda group, for information, in the presence of several other operatives, including new agent Maya (Chastain), who has apparently only just been recruited out of high school. As the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that Maya's sole mission is to gather intelligence in order to cause the capture and/or death of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden. In the course of the film she goes from being a cautious rookie to a hardened field operative, who in the span of a few years shows no compunction about ordering burly enforcers to pummel suspected terrorists in the face in order to milk them for information. The entire routine of torture does nothing to prevent a deadly terrorist attack in 2004, but later, a little bit of deception and a hot meal with Ammar elicits a name, UBL's supposed number-one courier Abu Ahmed, before the trail ends in a brick wall, one through which no amount of waterboarding or punching in the face can break.
Years later, however, some cross-checking by Maya's colleagues in the CIA discloses vital information that was missed the first time around, and through deduction, technology, and one hell of a bribe, Maya tracks her man quite literally to Osama bin Laden's doorstep. Thus the stage is set for the rubout that captivated basically the entire English-speaking world nearly two years ago, and quite possibly several parts of the world that did not. After months of debating whether or not to descend upon the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the U.S. government finally makes the fateful call and the rest, as they say, is history.
I'm no historian, so I cannot really comment on the criticism of the film that it falsely claims that torture led to the eventual death of bin Laden. People ranging from American Senators to bloggers have weighed in, saying that bin Laden's death was brought about by legitimate sleuthing, and that the torture programs of the Central Intelligence Agency yielded nothing but false leads. The movie, the accusation goes, glorifies torture by asserting that it was a key element leading to bin Laden's eventual death. They say that there is no way that something as positive as bin Laden's death was brought about by something as overwhelmingly negative as torture.
What strikes me as genuinely odd is how anyone could view bin Laden's death, at least in the context of how it was depicted in the film, as a good thing.
For one thing, bin Laden was not killed in a field of battle in broad daylight, while commanding another terrorist strike against the West. He was not killed while wielding a high-powered firearm or wearing a suicide-bomber's vest. He was not surrounded by dozens of armed confederates.
He was, rather, killed in the dead of night by a team that comprised what looked like two dozen heavily-armed Navy SEALs, in the company of women, children, and a grand total of three lightly-armed men who were scattered all throughout the compound where he lived. An unarmed woman was shot in the back and killed in the course of the operation that killed bin Laden. Wounded men were shot multiple times to make sure they were dead. Bin Laden himself was reportedly unarmed; the film does not confirm this, but neither does it go out of its way to refute it. Some of the children present in the compound witnessed the murder of people who were presumably their parents, after which they were rounded up in a room, then hastily abandoned when it was reported that the Pakistani government was scrambling its jets and the SEAL team had to leave as quickly as possible.
Again, how anyone could view the events that took place in this scene as a "good" thing is beyond me. I suppose I'm not that imaginative a person. What struck me, though, was the brutal honesty of this scene, which did not hesitate to show that the SEAL6 team acted a lot more like a gang of hired guns than crack military troops.
There are also little bits scattered throughout the narrative that to my mind debunk the theory that this film is a ringing endorsement of atrocity as a means to combat terrorism. In a crucial briefing scene, a fairly high CIA official named George (Mark Strong) berates everyone below his pay grade, demanding that they deliver targets to kill. There is no talk on winning the war on terror, or saving innocent American lives. There are only enemies that need to die, with basically no regard for such niceties as due process. There is no victory in sight in the "War on Terror," there is only the next kill.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter if torture helped "get" bin Laden or not; the very act of perpetrating his cold-blooded murder (at least in the manner in which it was depicted) showed that the men and women of the government of the United States had forsaken their humanity. I did not see anything in this film that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government. But again, that's just me.
At the end of it all, Maya, having seen and identified the corpse of bin Laden, breaks down and cries while onboard a C-130 that will take her home. These are the tears of a woman who has accomplished what has become her sole purpose in life, and for whom life basically no longer holds any meaning. Whatever anyone might say about this film, it is hard to deny the power of Chastain's performance here; her journey from a fledgling agent lurking in the background to a firebrand ready to utter profanities in the presence of her boss, no less than CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) is transfixing, and even as a fan of the TV series Homeland I have to say that Chastain's Maya makes Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison look like a cartoon character. There are a number of solid performances on display in this movie, and with over 100 speaking parts and a running time of over two and a half hours plenty of performers are given ample room to flex their acting chops, but Chastain still stands out, and it is for this reason that this film basically belongs to her. Had those inclined to criticize this film appreciated it as being a story of how one woman's obsession with bin Laden eventually stripped away her humanity and her ability or inclination to do anything else with her life, perhaps they would have been kinder to it, but the painful truth of it is this woman's obsession mirrored that of many other people in America, which is perhaps why it was easy for some audiences in America to swallow the rather disturbing depiction of the Abbottabad raid as the triumph of the "hero" Maya.
Considering that the film purports to be grounded in reality, one inevitably wonders if bin Laden's death will have any lasting and meaningful effect on the so-called "War on Terror." The film makes no suggestion that there has been any real blow dealt to Al Qaeda, and it is just as well because any claim to this effect would not only betray the film as outright propaganda but would ignore the fact that since bin Laden's death in 2011, there have been several more terror attacks, including an attack last September 11, 2012 at the American Embassy in Libya that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American citizens. Apparently, those people didn't need bin Laden to tell them what to do.
To my mind, Zero Dark Thirty is not a propaganda piece. To me, it is a film, one that in many ways closely follows what happened in real life (as shown by the depiction of several actual terror attacks, as well as the painstaking reproduction of the SEAL6 operation, no matter how unflattering it was) but in which liberties have still been taken with its decidedly touchy subject matter. I'll concede that the debate it has stirred on how accurately it has depicted factual events is a point against it considering it has been marketed as a true-to-life film, but if it's one thing the depiction of a savage attack of a civilian compound in the middle of the night resulting in multiple murder makes clear, it's that this film is not apologizing or making excuses for anyone. It is not about glossing over inconvenient truths as much as it is admitting them.
4/5
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