Zero Dark Thirty

2009’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, and was hailed as a great film about the Iraq War. I agreed with that assessment. The movie I’d most compare it to is Platoon (my favorite war film), as like Oliver Stone’s Vietnam picture, it eschewed political messages and Hollywoodized sentiment and simply presented an unfiltered look at warfare from the ground level.

The movie was also, according to many real veterans, highly inaccurate in its depiction of Iraq. Now, inaccuracy doesn’t automatically doom a movie (I mean, nobody watches Rambo to get a realistic look at combat, do they?), but when a film is purported to be a super accurate account of what it depicts, do allegations that it's not dim its power at all?

 

I can’t say for certain with The Hurt Locker because I have yet to revisit it, but this thought was there while watching Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The film claims to be the definitive account of the search for, and mission to eliminate, Osama bin Laden, and the production’s alleged consultation with the U.S. government suggests the filmmakers strived for total accuracy. And yet, I couldn’t shake the Hurt Locker allegations, and the controversy about this film on top of that, from my mind.

We all know the ending, so let’s get this out of the way: The raid on bin Laden’s compound during the film’s last 40 minutes is a fantastic work of filmmaking. It’s not a flashy Call of Duty-style firefight filled with explosions and extended shootouts with several minions. The killings are quick, efficient, and unglamorous. Women and children are in harm’s way, and some of them are killed, too. The mission’s slow, methodical, no-frills execution, along with perfect editing, gives the whole sequence a freeze-in-your-seat tension greater than any big action sequence in an escapist summer movie. It feels very real.

Until that point, the film shows the efforts of the CIA to locate the al-Qaeda leader. It’s a little like an espionage thriller, but fictional spy tales tend to have a set structure and sequence of events and clues for the viewer to piece together. In Zero Dark Thirty, clues and leads are all over the place, with little or no indication whether they’re of any value or dead ends. It’s not very easy to follow, like trying to put together a puzzle with a million fake pieces mixed with the real ones, and makes it seem like a miracle that the agency was able to find bin Laden.

What did find him, according to the film, was a lead pursued relentlessly over several years by a CIA agent based in Pakistan known onscreen as Maya (Jessica Chastain; the real names of those involved are not revealed, and all characters are listed only by their first names). Chastain’s performance consists almost purely of will, and she is a compelling center to the picture as she navigates a near-labyrinthine web of false leads and tips, as well as badgers her superiors and colleagues into following her lead when they believe it’s just another wild goose chase. It almost seems a little farfetched that this one person was so instrumental in locating bin Laden, but then, it also seems like blind luck that her lead turned out to be correct among so many that went nowhere.

Almost lost among the movie’s critical acclaim is a vocal minority chastising it as pro-American War on Terror propaganda. It’s hard to make that case watching the film. It’s very grim, almost hopeless in its tone. If the ending weren’t a foregone conclusion, the movie could be mistaken for a lament on the zero-sum gains the U.S. has seen in the War on Terror, and even when the raid is over and bin Laden is dead, the picture doesn’t take on a fist-pumping patriotic tone, or even offer a sense of satisfaction.

Which leads me to the element of the film everyone’s talking about: its depiction of torture. And yes, it makes it damn clear that what was done to detainees was torture, as what happens to them onscreen is clearly inhumane and cruel. It might be hard to watch for some on a visceral level, but its effect is more sickening and infuriating from a moral standpoint, to see what our country has done to people.

Bigelow has said that “depiction is not endorsement." Judging by her depiction of it, I don’t think she endorses torture. In fact, the main torture sequence seems almost anecdotal, as if to show that torture does NOT yield good results (which it specifically does not in the film). But the depiction of its effectiveness is mixed overall. Other times, tortuous methods seem like just part of the interrogation process. In one scene, when the characters are watching a TV interview with then-President-elect Obama condemning torture (the only appearance by a President in the movie in any capacity), they roll their eyes, either at the naiveté of the new Commander-In-Chief or because his election means they’ll lose support for such interrogation methods. If you were going by this movie alone, it’s hard not to get the sense that torture contributed to getting bin Laden. According to some official reports, that’s not true.

That’s the paradox about Zero Dark Thirty. Like The Hurt Locker, I’m not sure how real it is, but moreover, I don’t want it to be real. I can’t exactly say I liked the experience of the movie, not because of any flaw in the production—it’s technically masterful and quite compelling, worthy of many of the awards it’s been up for—but because of the horrible truths it depicts about what our country has carried out in our name.