Zero Dark Thirty - Review

Starring: Jessica Chastain / Jason Clarke
Writer: Mark Boal
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Runtime: 157 minutes

• Uncle Sam gets payback
• Keeps it moving
• Holds the politics
• Good cast of non-stars

Zero Dark Thirty is that rarest of post 9/11 films: a story where al-Qaeda is the enemy and Americans are the good guys.

You can count on one hand the number of films made since September 11, 2001, that define radical Islam as an enemy of human liberty, and don't serve up Americans as greedy, oil sucking, two-faced creeps.

It's hard to even find a movie that mentions the words September 11th, as if that date was wiped clean from the consciences of anything but the most hardcore NRA bigot screenwriter. (As you can tell, it's been one of my hobby horses to watch Hollywood's cowards twist themselves into yoga-inspired knots while avoiding the words Islam and terror).

Generally speaking, if Hollywood produces a movie about terrorists, the terrorist will be anything but a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Hollywood's pathological avoidance of the subject is made most clear by action movies like Live Free or Die Hard, Skyfall, or any of the Bourne movies, where the terrorist bad guys turn out to be - shocker of shockers - guys from our own side. The latest flick I saw that did the faux-terrorist-switcheroo was Jack Reacher: a sniper knocks off a bunch of people in a crowded park and guess what? A former US soldier is framed for it. But not to worry, it's actually a corporate entity that set it up.

Are we this transparent, or what?

I sometimes ponder how this happened. During the Cold War, writers had a bad guy at their fingertips: the Russians. So the writers used the Russians, even though the Russians were more of an existential threat to the average movie-goer than an actual physical presence. That is, we were afraid the Russians might nuke us someday, or that a spy might by lurking in Washington DC, but other than that, we just knew they were the Bad Guy Over There.

The Nazis and the Japanese were regarded as the Bad Guys, too, and writers still use them to this day. Indeed, Nazi Germany gets more bad press in films 60 years after WWII (Inglorious Basterds, Defiance, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Reader, Valkyrie, among other Nazi movies from the past decade) than radical Islamists ever will.

Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany. Bad guys, with a mountain of movies to show for it. Heck, even the Vietnam war gets thrown in there once in a while, even if it's mostly used to say that American soldiers liked to smoke dope and cry a lot.

When it came to those peoples and cultures, Hollywood had no problem pointing the finger and claiming some sort of moral or cultural superiority. But when it comes to radical Islam, those fingers are  pointed back at themselves, when they are even pointed at all.

It is strange, isn't it? Islamic terrorists are a palpable enemy and they are an existential as well as a physical threat. They knock down buildings, incinerate busses, and cut off people's heads for an internet audience. Heck, just this week they took over an entire gas refinery and killed a bunch of hostages from a variety of countries. To put it mildly, Islamic fundamentalists are around, and they're busy. They do all kinds of nasty stuff that translates well to today's bloodfest movies: blow stuff up, take hostages, and kill innocent people who need to be rescued by special forces.

So where's the movies?

There's probably all kinds of reasons these movies aren't made, but top of the list are politics and cowardice. The politics come from the hangover of Vietnam (war is bad) mixed with the cocktail of post-Reagan liberalism (we are bad). Put them together and you get films like Redacted, though once in a while a film like The Kingdom slips in. Even then, however, filmmakers get nervous. When Kingdom director Peter Berg heard an audience applaud at the climax of his film, he wondered, "Is this American blood lust?" Buddy, relax. They're just glad the good guy got the bad guy. They're not going to leave the theatre and invade Kuwait.

The cowardice part is easy: if you insult radical Islamists in books or films, they say that they're going to kill you, and then they sometimes do. That simple. So I can't really blame producers for being a little on the chicken side, but please spare me the "George Clooney is brave" talk when he makes a movie about McCarthyism in the '50s. Big deal.

Which brings us - finally, you're saying - to Zero Dark Thirty. If it is true that people who make movies critical of radical Islam can face threats on their lives, then the makers of this movie are brave indeed, especially director Kathryn Bigelow. Still, the film is more of a by-the-numbers look at the search for Osama bin Laden than anything else and there isn't anything overtly political. Bigelow's good like that. She did the same in The Hurt Locker.

In this movie, we follow a CIA operative named Maya (Jessica Chastain), whose personal and professional quest is to find Osama bin Laden and see him die. This quest lasts ten years. She has done nothing else since the CIA, as she says, "Recruited me out of high school." I found it poetic that it was a woman who hunted bin Laden down, just as it took a woman (Bigelow) to tell the story and do it justice.

Some people might not like the scenes of torture, er, enhanced interrogation techniques in the film. Watching these scenes, I was reminded of all the pussyfooting around that was going on a decade ago. Is torture legal? Is it not? Is waterboarding torture? Is sleep deprivation torture?

Politicians of all stripes hemmed and hawed about it. Republican Bush denied it, and Democrat Feinstein still does. For my money, I wouldn't want to be tortured, but I don't get bent out of shape that others may have been. You knock down a couple of buildings and kill 3000 people, you might get slapped around a little.

What I did find myself thinking is, "What's it all for?" The terrorism, I mean. I'm not a complete fool: I know that the point of terrorism is terror, and in radical Islam's case it's about religion, and I do subscribe to the belief that we're rich and they hate us, but all the same it's such a stupid waste. In the movie, the CIA agents are in Pakistan or Afghanistan, observing people who hide out in slums and plot to murder bus riders half a world away. Do these thugs honestly have nothing better to do with their time?

There's considerable debate about how much of the movie is true. That's fine. I always caution that when a movie says Based on actual events, you need to beware of the word based, and the "s" in events. The lead character, Maya, is no doubt a hybrid of several people, which is a pretty common storytelling technique. Apparently Bigelow did have access to some confidential information, which lends the movie good credibility. For me, I took heart from seeing the screw ups during the hit on bin Laden, as well as Maya's extreme frustration that it takes the government months to act on her information. Big screw ups? Unbearable waiting times? That's got real government written all over it.

Zero Dark Thirty is an engrossing movie. It's long, but it doesn't feel long. If you want to see Uncle Sam get some payback, see the movie.

Photos: Rotten Tomatoes