After an insanely succesful awards streak in 2009-2010, Kathryn Bigelow stopped being the woman behind Point Break and K19: The Widowmaker and became synonymous with hardened, intense army warfare that's super serious. With the aide of writer/journalist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker was a great mix of enthralling drama and really nail-biting thriller. It was tough to beat.
The duo, however, opted to set their sites on a grander scale with Zero Dark Thirty, the story of one CIA agent's obsession with tracking down Osama Bin Laden, and a film that almost happened without much of a conclusion.
Jessica Chastain is Maya, a woman who begins the film fresh into interrogation rooms as Jason Clarke's grizzled hardcase instigates some answers by any means from people, and over a decade of story we see her get harder, more obsessed, sinking into the hole of work to find and take out Osama Bin Laden. Everyone she meets, from Mark Duplass to Kyle Chandler, John Barrowman to James Gandolfini, they are all weary of this mad obsession to hunt down the man, and remain skeptical until the final 45 minutes, which might not have been a part of the film had no movement on Bin Laden's location everbeen flagged up.
The first 2 hours of Zero Dark Thirty are dry, very dry. People have compared it to Zodiac, but Zodiac has compelling writing and Downey Jr., Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo are engaging on-screen, as much as Chastain is a great performer, she's lumbered with nothing more than an exposition-spouting mouth-piece in a film that favours facts over character. As he film mixes long scenes of impenetrable dialogue with overly-cinematic renditions of moments such as the London bombings, it's clear that Bigelow's visuals are second to none, however she can't get a grip on bringing the audience into the investigation, and it all feels like scenes happening behind a glass, we can hear it, but we have no concept of what's actually being said. However, we all know the end result, and this is something that lessens the first two hours more-so.
Once the decidedly dull first two thirds are out of the way, however, and SEALs Joel Edgerton and Christ Pratt appear, the film feels like it's in control of everything, and masterful tells a version of the raid on the compound that Bin Laden is in. Every gunshot, every explosion, every hint of movement brings the tension up high, and unlike the rest of the film, knowing what happens doesn't hinder the sequence. It is a masterful told version of events that runs an exquisitely long time and indulges in the minutia that makes everything feel so important, and makes the audience feel that we are part of the team. It's this feeling of inclusion that is lacking from the first two hours and is required to make us get interested in and obsessed with the investigation like our lead protagonist appears to be. Once she's out of the picture, oddly the film really picks up, and the hunt for Bin Laden is a masterwork of tension and excitement. It is pure cinema.
Such a shame that the film manages to miss-fire so frequently prior to this sequence, infuriating beyond belief. Even with this issue, it's odd that Bigelow didn't get an Oscar nomination for the final 30-40 minutes alone, which'd be a highlight in many directors' careers themselves. Ultimately, Zero Dark Thirty is a really tedious, un-engaging and dry drama that doesn't really give the audience anything to chew on, but come in 2 hours late and be prepared for one of the finest sequence in recent movie history.