Zero Dark Thirty – Movie Review by Joe Calleri.

What: Zero Dark Thirty – Movie Review

Reviewer: Joe Calleri
Stars: 2 and a half.

Running at well over two and a half hours, and covering a ten-year timeline commencing from the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States, director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest movie, Zero Dark Thirty (the title derives, apparently, from a military term meaning half past midnight), traces the United States government’s near impossible, needle in a haystack search for Al-Qaeda bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden.

Maya (Jessica Chastain) is the movie’s heroine and central character, and one of the CIA operatives completely obsessed with and immersed in the task of finding Bin Laden – it would appear, at all costs. Her life, it appears, revolves entirely around this one monumental task. The search, unsurprisingly, exposes Maya, and the other CIA operatives engaged on the task, to enormous personal risks. Some CIA operatives and US military personnel, pay the ultimate price for the search with their lives.

Movie-goers should be warned that, the movie features several lengthy, unnecessarily graphic and realistically gruesome scenes of torture upon Al-Qaeda suspected terrorists by CIA operatives, conducted at various CIA Black Sites scattered around the northern hemisphere. I understand that, Bigelow and writer, Mark Boal, have – quite rightly in my view - attracted stinging criticism for the highly detailed torture scenes in the movie.

Those with squeamish dispositions, or who hold strong views and an aversion to the systematic, and state-approved torture of political prisoners and detainees, should certainly avoid this movie. 

This movie will alienate many moviegoers, especially those expecting a conventional, shoot ‘em up, action/adventure, in the style of the far more exciting, but altogether fictional “Navy Seals”, or “Delta Force”.

Audiences will find they have to wait patiently for almost two hours for the actual SEAL assault upon Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. Australians Joel Edgerton and Callan Mulvey, portray two of the anonymous US NAVY SEAL’s (incidentally, since the Disney Corporation owns the copyright to the terms “SEAL’s” and the now defunct “SEAL Team Six”, there is, frustratingly, no specific mention in this movie to those special warfare units) involved in the assault upon Bin Laden’s lair.

Strangely, one of the most compelling aspects of the assault upon the compound – the actual detailed planning of the assault - is strangely, all but glossed over by the film-makers.

And, when the assault finally occurs, many movie-goers will be decidedly underwhelmed by the slow, deliberate, unemotional, quasi-documentary style that Bigelow has decided to direct and shoot this lengthy sequence. Some viewers may also be shocked by the graphic, realistic depictions of the SEAL’s assassinating several men and women who were occupying the Bin Laden compound at the time of the assault. The SEAL’s shoot corpses repeatedly to ensure they are in fact, deceased.

The eventual assassination of Bin Laden – controversially, this movie makes it clear that, the US government’s specific instructions to the SEAL’s were to “kill”, rather than “kill or capture”, Bin Laden - is, consequently, hugely anti-climactic.

So, what to make of this ponderous, slow-moving, humourless film? Well, in my view, since it lacks sufficient hard, military, boys-own, kick-ass action, it fails as a pure action/adventure movie. And, since it appears to sits on the fence regarding the touchy, complex issue of state-sanctioned torture and the assassination of enemies of the state, it also fails as a political thriller. Zero Dark Thirty, then, is one of those confounding, frustrating movies that is doomed to exist in its own bubble of mediocrity.