Movie Review - Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Reda Kateb, Mark Strong, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and James Gandolfini

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

It is an inevitability that people are going to compare director Kathryn Bigelow's Afghanistan and Pakistan-based Zero Dark Thirty with her fantastic Best Picture-winning Iraq-centric The Hurt Locker.  Whether that is a fair comparison or not, I'm not going to say, but Ms. Bigelow (and her reunited screenwriter Mark Boal) doesn't stretch much from her comfort zone of Middle Eastern-set war movies.  With such a powerful first glance at this landscape a few years ago, hopes were set high for Zero Dark Thirty and unfortunately it's simply not as good as her previous effort.

In my Hurt Locker review, I stated that the film contained "edge-of-your-seat excitement" and I know many would scoff at that remark thinking that the film actually moved at a rather slow pace.  Somehow, though, Bigelow managed to achieve great amounts of tension for me despite deliberately pacing the film.  In Zero Dark Thirty, the pacing is still slowly deliberate, but the tension simply isn't there.  Is it because we already know the result in that Osama bin Laden is killed?  I think that's part of the issue, but not the sole problem.

The film is slowly building for nearly two hours to the invasion of bin Laden's hideaway in Pakistan and while there are moments along the way that create tension, Bigelow isn't able to create a steady escalation which, in retrospect, almost makes the bin Laden raid (which is shown rather interestingly in an almost first person-"you are one of the soldiers" style of filmmaking) a bit of a letdown.  For the entirety of the movie, we watch as CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) fights her superiors on almost every step of the way in the hunt for the terrorist leader.  The movie is much more about the character of Maya and her struggles, and, to be quite honest, I never found myself caring about her.  It doesn't help that the script gives Chastain nothing to work with.  She's told to be averse to torture at first, but then slowly come around to embracing it.  She's told to look steadfast and resolute at all times.  She's told to be strong and not break down.  She's told to never waver in her desire to catch bin Laden and her belief that she is right in terms of his location.  Don't get me wrong -- I'm thrilled that this woman existed in real life (although I've read that "Maya" isn't based on any one specific person, but is an amalgamation of several), but I'm not quite sure this is a character to build a movie around.  The character is such a one-note figure only doing what the film's plot requires of her rather than actually having her own journey and I feel that this is another key reason why the film isn't quite a success.

Zero Dark Thirty isn't a bad film.  The story certainly kept me interested and despite my issues with the film, Bigelow is still a better director than most out there (and Mark Boal's screenplay is still a smart adult drama albeit with some problems).  Perhaps it's unfair to compare a film like this to Bigelow and Boal's earlier work, but as I said above, I think it's inevitable, and Zero Dark Thirty just comes out significantly below their fantastic collaboration in The Hurt Locker.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-