Zero Dark Thirty

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

(R)

****

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“The movie of the year” is about to arrive, and much of Hollywood will not like its message, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. Kathryn Bigelow’s “gripping” re-creation of the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden confronts its viewers with some of the “very ugly things” that are done in the name of preserving American democracy, and ends up endorsing even torture as a necessary evil. Bigelow’s Left Coast peers so enjoyed her previous war film, The Hurt Locker, that they granted her an Oscar. “I’m betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie.” But that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from going to see Zero Dark Thirty. Americans “should never turn a blind eye” to “the muck and stink” of the endless fight for the security of the nation, and this movie has the courage to bring it to us.

A female CIA analyst leads the way, said Marlow Stern in TheDailyBeast.com. Playing a green recruit who follows a hunch all the way to bin Laden’s doorstep, Jessica Chastain strikes “just the right balance of wild determination and poise under pressure.” Her Maya learns the ropes as she goes, but she’s “someone not to be toyed with.” The audience realizes that early, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Moments after we revisit the pain of 9/11, via audio of distress calls made by individuals who were trapped inside New York’s burning twin towers, young Maya doesn’t flinch as she watches a colleague repeatedly waterboard a Saudi Arabian terror suspect. The clue obtained that day—the alias of bin Laden’s most trusted courier—becomes an eight-year obsession. Zero Dark Thirty “immerses us, brilliantly,” in Maya’s dogged detective work. The successful 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound will emerge directly from Maya’s efforts, but before that tense, drawn-out climax, there’ll be other action sequences—directed with “such visually supple real-time suspense” that Bigelow “just about controls your heartbeat.”

But it matters that this “mercilessly gripping” movie “makes a case for the efficacy of torture,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. By directly linking the waterboarding of a detainee to the takedown of bin Laden, the filmmakers offer an endorsement of the CIA’s most brutal interrogation techniques that “borders on the politically and morally reprehensible.” In reality, it took eight years of painstaking intelligence work to identify and track down bin Laden’s courier, said Peter Bergen in CNN.com. Waterboarding and torture, say the FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee, produced little or no useful information. Zero Dark Thirty may be “a great piece of filmmaking,” but its central premise is simply “not supported by the facts.”