REVIEW: ZERO DARK THIRTY

If you can hark back to the ancient days of Oscar season 2011, you'll remember that like this year, there were nine nominees, with one 9/11-themed movie as well: "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."   "ELIC" was the odd man out of last year's nominees, with critics not so polarized as they were flat out displeased with it.  That movie dealt with post 9/11 trauma in a completely different way, but Thomas Horn's whiny protagonist and Jessica Chastain's B.A. spy do have one thing in common: they are completely and utterly obsessed with their subject; his finding his father's last message and her....bin Laden.

Is there a 17 year old version of her?

The movie opens, surprisingly not with the torture sequences you've been hearing so much about, but with 9/11 emergency calls made on that day.  It's a lividly intense few minutes, even if the screen is completely back, and you realize listening to that audio is all the evidence one needs to feel angry, helpless and vengeful for whoever was the source of it.  I admire Bigelow for not using any actual 9/11 imagery, like "ELIC" did.  Then we get into those talked about torture everyone's been whining about: I wasn't exactly sure how the water-boarding was going to be portrayed.  The truth is it's painful to sit through, watching a man being degraded that low; you squirm a bit, cringe, etc.  But Bigelow and Oscar winning writer Mark Boal are simply showing what happened in the process: we were all devastated and boiling with rage after 9/11, and hard times lead to hard measures.  I don't think it condones or shows torture in a positive light.  It's just what it is.

The next few hours is a little less easier to swallow...it's a lot of talk of catching terrorists, finding leads to bin Laden, and so many foreign names are thrown at you that it's easily overwhelming.  Abu Ahmed is the simplest of names you'll hear in "Zero Dark Thirty," and for anyone who didn't follow the bin Laden tracking as closely as Chastain's Maya it can be more than a little confusing.  But I didn't get totally lost, the action peppered throughout this spy drama connected a few dots for me and the audience.  Mostly I tried to focus on Chastain's likely Oscar-winning performance, and if it was justified to beat Naomi Watts' work in "The Impossible."  The answer is murky, in this film Chastain doesn't have those moments where she can belt out those agonizing screams for her children...she doesn't have children.  She doesn't have a boyfriend...she doesn't have friends.  She has coworkers and associates and acquaintances who are on this case to find the man who's name is now in the same breath of Adolph Hitler.  It is all she does, all she lives to be.  You've seen the clip they show on TV, Tony Soprano asks "What else have you done for [the CIA?]"  Maya replies "Nothing."

You have to both admire and be disgusted by this display of total obsession.  Along the way Maya sees friends come and go, loses a few people...the journey is ridden with struggles and obstacles.  This mirrors America's view on bin Laden as well.  After a while I thought I'd never see the day bin Laden was killed...then my mom woke up on May 2.  This raid scene...it's something else.  Shot in no way like an action thriller, it still is fairly suspenseful, and it shows you that what these Seals do...is just business.  We'll never be sure what really happened in the middle of the night on May 1, (and if you think this is a 100% reenactment, you're naive) just know Bigelow did a superb job of staging it.  The movie really only has Chastain as its anchor, mainly because she's the completely driven one, and the movie is clearly a director's picture.

Looking at this year's roster of best picture nominees: this, "Lincoln," "Argo"....in all three cases you know what's going to happen at the end if you read up in your history textbooks.  But the power of these films, and the magic only movies like this can provide while still maintaining that military grit Bigelow harnessed in "Hurt Locker," the audience will keep second guessing, and hoping for the best result.  Forget torture scenes...that's something to talk about.

Rating: 3.5/4 stars