Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) covers the ten year intelligence effort that found Osama bin Laden, and the raid at the end. At its centre is a CIA analyst named Maya. Most of the film is not the raid; it is reading documents, listening to recordings, chasing one courier's name for years. It is realistic because the work is dull. The last thirty minutes are the raid, shot in night vision, nearly silent, without any language of heroism. The first section contains torture, and that is where the argument started. The film shows information obtained under interrogation as the beginning of the trail. Three US senators wrote to the studio saying this was contrary to the record, the acting head of the CIA issued a statement to staff, and the Senate intelligence committee opened an inquiry into what the agency had shared with the filmmakers. So this stopped being an argument about a film and became an institutional reckoning. Kathryn Bigelow and the writer Mark Boal had made The Hurt Locker, and the same cold documentary texture is here. Jessica Chastain's Maya has almost no private life on screen; the character has one job and the film asks nothing else of her. It runs 157 minutes. Good for: intelligence work, true events, and cold narration. Less good for: the torture scenes are long and disturbing, and this is not an emotional film.