Tortures, explosions, executions- you’ll see a lot of these in the latest spy-thriller film called Zero Dark Thirty. But more significantly, the movie is about a grand manhunt.
Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar Best Director for her 2009 film, Hurt Locker, captivated the audience with her latest film that chronicled America’s efforts to kill Osama Bin Laden, the perpetrator of the grim 9/11 attack on World Trade Center. It took a while before Bin Laden was taken down, but the film would make you understand how hard it was to locate a high-profile terrorist with a lot of devotees and supporters. It’d inform you that it was great surveillance, intelligence and persistence that made the hunt successful after such a seemingly long time.
Bigelow and her team were able to provide a tense atmosphere right from the first scene wherein a captive with links to the Al-Qaeda (the terrorist group that Bin Laden led) was being tortured by the American forces in an undisclosed location. You will be shocked, surprised and probably stunned about the events that were thought and assumed to happen during the manhunt. Scene after scene, Bigelow was able to up the ante of suspense until the climax, wherein you would just feel compelled to watch every single thing that’s happening onscreen.
Jessica Chastain was brilliant as the movie’s lead character, Maya. She reminded me of the character that Claire Danes portrays in Homeland as a very smart and very persistent CIA agent. Little that people know it was the female character she was portraying that was the main reason how Bin Laden was exterminated. Chastain’s naturalness in her role complemented the strong supporting cast, which provided consistently good acting all throughout the movie.
I would love to tackle morality in the movie but I thought that it has just taken into account what merely happened, regardless if some actions were good and right or bad and wrong. Ultimately, it’s the decisions the people in power made that mattered. And that tells a lot about what leader or leaders each nation should be having.
Zero Dark Thirty movie rating by the pondering movie fan: 4.5 out of 5
The Pondering Movie Fan 