While The Hurt Locker periodically offered potent doses of thrills, Zero Dark Thirty brings out the frustrating and hard ways of gathering intelligence and constantly hitting dead ends. The film follows breadcrumbs, sparsely sprinkled across the length of the breadth. The trails are so thin, there are times when the story appears to be going nowhere. It's a densely written work with a lot of facts and names. We all know how things end. The important task for Bigelow was to keep us invested in the process and sustain our interest till the very end. I must say she has managed to do exactly that.
I must confess I was most excited about the final scene. Honestly, I was a bit curious to know how the leads appeared but I didn't care much for them next to the actual raid. That was a historical moment. It's like recreating the Kennedy assassination. We've all read about it and seen animated representations on CNN but the picture never came clearly to our head. The fact that they are selling it as "the greatest manhunt in history" itself underlines the importance of the subject. The film sears you with boundless thrill as two choppers stealthily fly low over a dark and sleepy Pakistan. In that moment, I had this photograph appear in my head; the one that was splashed on newspapers across the world; the one with Obama, Clinton, Biden and other top staffs attentively watching a television screen showing live-feed from the cameras on the Navy Seal Team's head gear. How much this one event meant to them, not just politically, and to the world in general was what that made watching the climax all the more special.
During the raid sequence, the film sticks to minimal action and known facts. I remember reading that one of the two Navy SEAL choppers crash landed inside the Abbottabad complex. It was just a piece of information whose gravity didn't get to me. But watching the dramatized version made me realize how absurdly wrong things went. Zero Dark Thirty is an action film but unlike any other. In the film's most important juncture, Chris Pratt's character whispers 'Osama' in a fake accent hoping to lure his prize out. I hope it was intended to be funny, because it was hilarious. Just because the trick worked for him once before, him trying the same once again turned the moment into something so funny that every last bit of tension was diffused. Even the most important bullet in the film is fired without any dramatic build-up and OBL lays dead before you know it.
It is not a cheery movie. In its closing moments, it doesn't fill us with optimism and leaves our veins pumping with patriotism. The film actually continues with the "The rush of battle... for war is a drug." theme previously explored in detail in The Hurt Locker. Here is a person who was recruited to CIA straight out of high-school, is not an easy person to work with, has no real friends and has a career solely defined by this one single mission. She cannot afford to fail. And the inevitable sense of loss that washes over her at the end is palpable. She's the superhero who lost her nemesis and couldn't help but shed a tear. Once the weight gets lifted from her shoulders and she comes face to face with the sudden closure, the magnitude of the emotions bears her down.
William Goldenberg, who also worked on Argo, has co-edited this film and the pacing is very good. Boasting a stunning ensemble cast, Zero Dark Thirty is a very well crafted film. It may not break my top 10, but I am glad I caught this on the big screen.