Review by:
Kenji Fujishima

“History is written by the winners,” George Orwell famously wrote in 1944. In writing those words, Orwell was thinking about the ability of victorious parties to control the way future generations perceived, say, wartime atrocities, to the point of printing lies as truth simply because those lies came from the mouths of the victors. This pertains to Kathryn Bigelow’s new docudrama Zero Dark Thirty not because the film is full of lies—obviously, I don’t have access to the kinds of facts and records Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal did to make any such argument, and the film itself, though fictionalized, certainly bears the mark of a thoroughly researched tome in its emphasis on details—but because of the point-of-view from which the story of the hunt for the terrorist mastermind is told. Like another recent Hollywood thriller based on true events, Ben Affleck’s Argo, Zero Dark Thirty is told from the perspective of the people on the “right” side of history: in this case, the CIA agents who spent ten years after the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, tracking and eventually finding and killing terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. There is, at best, a superficial engagement with the “other side”: the Middle Eastern nations whom the United States invaded in the name of the “war against terrorism,” the victims of our morally problematic methods of torture and rendition, and so on. In short, Bigelow’s film doesn’t offer much of a challenge to any of the received media narratives about the heroism of these hard-working CIA operatives in catching the most wanted man in the world.

What does it offer, then? Zero Dark Thirty is a procedural that takes an ostensibly neutral approach to portraying the alternately exciting, exhausting and troubling search for bin Laden post-9/11. As with David Fincher’s Zodiac—not to mention its spiritual predecessor, Alan Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men—narrative detail is just about everything, as Bigelow efficiently lays out the intelligence-gathering process, imbuing it with the same kind of thrilling kinetic urgency that Bigelow propelled onto a more literal battlefield in her last film, The Hurt Locker. Also as with Zodiac, however, this film’s near-single-minded focus on process to some extent reveals character—in this case, that of Maya (Jessica Chastain), the CIA officer who eventually finds bin Laden.

At the beginning of the film, Maya is introduced witnessing the brutal torture of a detainee, and she’s visibly shaken by what she sees—but when she’s left alone in the room with that detainee, she manages to steel herself from the prisoner’s appeals to her empathy (“The best way you can get out of this is if you cooperate,” she says to him coldly). Through much of the rest of Zero Dark Thirty, we see Maya with that steely mask on, as she ruthlessly throws herself into the task of tracking down bin Laden; Boal’s process-driven screenplay and Bigelow’s chilly directorial style, in this context, could be said to coalesce with the character. But what is the price of Maya’s relentless, near-bloodthirsty pursuit? “Do you have a boyfriend?” a fellow female colleague asks her at one point, to which she answers in the negative. In another scene, a male superior pointedly asks her if she has done anything else other than hunt for this one man in the last few years; once again, her answer is “no.”

In this sense, Maya, in her ruthless drive, isn’t really all that different from, say, Jack Bauer, the anti-hero of the television series 24, another recent piece of entertainment that grappled with the many moral gray areas of America’s post-9/11 war on terror. But just because Zero Dark Thirty studiously avoids the unapologetic comic-book atmosphere of 24 (notwithstanding one bit of genre pandering in which Maya refers to herself as a “motherfucker”) doesn’t make Maya any more interesting a central character than Bauer was—and even Bauer was given more of a backstory to make his descent into near-psychopathy in later seasons more poignant and unsettling. However much persuasive inner fury Jessica Chastain manages to bring to Maya (and she’s undeniably spectacular in the role, suggesting a hollowed-out inner life to the character in ways that Boal's screenplay barely touches upon), she basically remains a cipher from beginning to end, Bigelow’s omniscient gaze only emphasizing just how much of a void she  is.

Others will surely view the omniscience as a credit to the film rather than a debit: an attempt on the filmmakers’ part to simply lay out the facts and allow the viewer to make up his/her own mind on what to think of what the filmmakers present onscreen. Certainly, the respect for the audience’s intelligence such an approach suggests is admirable. The limitations of this kind of faux-journalistic approach, however, can be seen in the film’s pièce de résistance: the climactic half-hour action sequence detailing the Navy SEAL invasion of bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

This setpiece is indeed a spectacular feat of action filmmaking: the rare modern-day sequence that doesn’t sacrifice spatial coherence for Michael Bay-style flash, in which following the geography of a space is given as much importance as waiting for the moments of violence to pop up. When the violence does pop up, it’s brutal, bloody and messy, not only physically but morally; Bigelow doesn’t shy away from showing us the ugly collateral damage during this U.S.-led operation, with sounds and images of crying wives and children cowering over their shot-dead loved ones.

And yet, as momentarily agonizing as it might be to witness those crying wives and children, ultimately they mean just as little to us in the audience as it does to the soldiers invading bin Laden’s compound, because the film, for all the gestures toward “objectivity,” has focused so much on the invading side and so little on the victims. This is central to understanding where Zero Dark Thirty comes up short. Though its cold-sober tone suggests a nonpolitical stance, the filmmakers’ choice to mostly focus on the American side of this deeply international story is still, intentional or not, a political choice in and of itself, suggesting an “America first” perspective, however blinkered and nuanced, that reinforces rather than challenges the way truly great art can do.