Zero Dark Thirty

For your consideration...

It’s always difficult to create suspense when the audience knows the outcome of a story.  Some films (ARGO) tackle this problem with success, others, in my opinion, not so much.  This is the case with Zero Dark Thirty.  I went into the theatre on opening day with high hopes.  The trailers looked good, the cast - stellar, the subject matter - interesting, yet what I saw on the screen fell short.  

I think my main issue about this film comes from the marketing and the hype surrounding it.  I’ve watched the trailers again (a few times actually) and I don’t feel the film delivered.  It’s like watching a trailer for a comedy that literally puts the only funny parts in the whole movie into that minute and a half.  The most suspenseful part of Zero Dark Thirty is the music from the trailer.  This film should not have been marketed as a thriller, rather, it should have been made as a documentary because it elicited no emotion from me.  They didn’t need actors or a plot (which was almost non-existent anyway).  Perhaps using Jessica Chastain as a no nonsense, determined strong female lead was an attempt to make this larger than life story that we all know more accessible, more human, but again, it fails.  The only characters who manage to pull off some response from me were the ones who played the Navy Seals, but their presence was far too late in this far too long movie to have the desired effect.

I’m not faulting the cast.  In fact, I’m a huge fan of many of them.  I would have loved to see Jessica Chastain win the Academy Award last year and I’ve had to refrain from attacking people who didn’t like Friday Night Lights such is my love of Kyle Chandler.  I just don’t think they were given much to do in this picture.  My only hope is that the cast can reunite in the future to make a film worthy of them.  

I won’t fault Kathryn Bigelow’s directing too much because I suppose she did it well.  The scenes in which the take down of bin Laden occurs, while overly long, were how I imagined they played out in real life.  She’s managed to present something to the audience that we would never be privy to in our every day lives.  She does this with the interrogation scenes at the beginning of the film, but again, they were too long.  I know there is much controversy about these torture scenes but really America, no, World, how do you think these things happen?  Do you think that suicide bombers who by their very existence live to die for their cause just rattle off information when asked?  Whether you agree with torture or not isn’t the point.  I don’t think Bigelow is glorifying anything, I just think she’s showing what she learned from her extensive research.  

I also take issue with the limited release of the film which allowed it to qualify for the Academy Awards this year.  I wonder if it had come out only on it’s actual release date of last Friday would it have garnered as many awards?  It certainly would have caused a controversy as any film with similar content would, but would we still be talking about a year later?  I wonder.

Essentially I felt that the movie was a whole lot of waiting.  Perhaps this would have been ok if I watched Zero Dark Thirty in say twenty years, when I hadn’t been alive during the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but the fact of the matter is, I was alive for the decade that the hunt took place, and I felt like I was forced to sit for a decade in that theatre.  I didn’t think it possible for me to want Osama bin Laden caught any faster than I did in real life, but watching Zero Dark Thirty, I wanted him caught sooner if only to end the movie.