The follow up to Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winning The Hurt Locker is Zero Dark Thirty, a film set around the ten year hunt for Osama Bin
Laden. Opening with an incredibly visceral, sound only montage of 9/11
telephone recordings in which people are heard calling home and on the phone to
the emergency services the film then follows the next ten years in the hunt for
9/11’s orchestrator, Osama Bin Laden. Young CIA Operative Maya (Jessica
Chastain) lands in Pakistan
to begin work at the US Embassy and various black sites in the area. She
witnesses torture first hand and soon picks up a lead which she believes will
bring the US
to Bin Laden.
The final forty minutes of the movie creates an incredibly
realistic reconstruction of the final assault on Bin Laden’s compound and is
perhaps the most compelling and seemingly accurate depiction of a black ops
mission I’ve ever seen. Tense doesn’t even come close and despite knowledge of
how things would pan out I was still glued to the screen with awe but felt
repulsed by its realism. The realism actually made me feel uncomfortable and
although I think that Zero Dark Thirty
is a good film, I didn’t like it.
