The hunt for bin Laden

Zero Dark Thirty (15)
Running time 157 minutes
Rating:****
As well as being one of the few women film directors in Hollywood, Kathryn Bigelow is also one of the few with sufficient grit to make a controversial war movie that doesn’t glorify and propagandise victory.
She has tackled three male-dominated war stories in her distinguished career so far – K-19: The Widowmaker, The Hurt Locker, and now Zero Dark Thirty – and some would argue passionately that the last is the best.
Certainly the Academy thinks so, with a handful of Oscar nominations, and the American viewing public also agrees, with good audience responses.
As with Hurt Locker, she takes a semi-documentary, downbeat angle on a gripping situation in Zero Dark Thirty (the military expression for half-past midnight), and the tension is racked up as a result.
Amid accusations of unusual assistance from the CIA, denied by the film-makers, Zero Dark Thirty tells the long, dogged and exhausting hunt for Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks.
America and the CIA were caught napping by the attack and went into full revenge mode as a result, tracking down anyone and everyone who had anything thought to have a connection to the terrorist attack that took the lives of close to 3,000 people.
In the film, along with hundreds of others, newly-trained operative Maya starts on the long hunt, interviewing suspects (usually involving repeated bouts of torture), working through hours of phone intercepts, following likely targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan and living the life akin to an obsessive and celibate monk.
Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) and fellow CIA agent Dan (Jason Clarke) are trying to locate bin Laden by identifying the people acting as couriers between him and his organisation.
The hunt goes on for nearly 10 years, with false leads, human error, bomb blasts and gun attacks along the way.
As the political game changes from Bush to Obama, and torture officially becomes much less acceptable, Maya despairs of ever finishing her task, but eventually, as we are aware, bin Laden was found living half-a-mile from Pakistan’s equivalent of the US military academy West Point.
In go the US equivalent of the SAS. Fortunately, such is Bigelow’s skill that the excitement of that last engagement is not diminished, even though the outcome is already known.
People may flinch at the torture and killing, and dispute its morality, but the incidents and scenes are handled in a documentary style that does not preach at the audience but allows us to have our own opinions.
In its low-key way, Zero Dark Thirty works well and is a good example that martial music and high melodrama is not necessary to raising the audience’s temperature. What you do need is a good story, handled by a top-notch director, working with largely unknown but more-than competent actors – and this film has the lot.