Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

The term 'Zero Dark Thirty' is derived from military time and means 30 minutes after midnight, or as Dictionary.com states "a very early morning hour, implying an unpleasant time to be awake." Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow follow up to her Oscar winning The Hurt Locker,  is about an extended "unpleasant time to be awake", the decade long effort to track down Al-Quida leader Usama bin Laden. Much of the events chronicled in the film are doubtless still classified and shrouded in mystery, even the actual name of the films Protagonist (here portrayed ably by the great Jessica Chastain) is unknown.

"Is Jessica Chastain's character based on a real CIA agent? CIA officers have confirmed that Jessica Chastain's CIA analyst "Maya" is based on an actual bin Laden hunter. The real female analyst joined the CIA before the September 11 attacks, and worked for a time in Pakistan identifying targets for drone attacks. Like Chastain, the agent is now in her 30s. And, like Maya, the wunderkind CIA analyst was single-mindedly devoted to finding bin Laden and was known to be combative in that task." http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/was-jessica-chastains-character-in-zero-dark-thirty-based-on-a-real-person/

So while the film was early billed as 'the true story of the woman who brought down Usama bin Laden' (and isn't great that it was a woman), it will be interesting to learn how much of the details this movie got right as further information about the hunt, location, and killing of the despised Al-Quida leader is doubtless made public over the course of the coming years. So a good film to compare it to in this respect would be All the Presidents Men, and I think this movie actually holds up well in that comparison.

The late Roger Ebert said of this movie: "The film's opening scenes are not great filmmaking. They're heavy on jargon and impenetrable calculation, murky and heavy on theory. [...] My guess is that much of the fascination with this film is inspired by the unveiling of facts, unclearly seen. There isn't a whole lot of plot – basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is." And he's right, it's a jargony film, the narrative and progression are not smooth, but neither was the actual efforts to eliminate bin Laden. For me this really wasn't a problem, I enjoyed the film's structure, which felt like rough shards of narrative with minimal context, I thought it was appropriate for the story being told, and this story of an obsessive CIA analyst an appropriate companion piece to the story of an obsessive bomb disposal expert that was The Hurt Locker. A strong piece of film making in the post 9/11 milieu that has become director Bigelow's trademark canvas. ***1/2