tl;dr – I watched Zero Dark Thirty so you didn’t have to.
It’ll be released in the UK on the 25th, but thanks to the magic of the internet, I watched this last night from the comfort of my own home. I had seen the trailers and read a little about it beforehand, but nothing could prepare me for just how bad this movie truly is.
It opens with a totally dark screen and snippets from recorded emergency from the people trapped in the World Trade Centre buildings during 9/11. Cut to a CIA dark site and approximately ten minutes of unexpurgated torture of some brown bloke by a bunch of white guys, with an only just slightly shocked Jessica Chastain looking on. He gets strung up from the ceiling, punched, waterboarded and sexually humiliated. Later on in the film, they deprive him of sleep for days on end, force feed him and put him in a tiny wooden box. The main torture dude keeps on saying, “when you lie to me, bro’ - I hurt you”. It’s not very nice.
The film goes on to tell the story of how Jessica Chastain’s character, CIA agent Maya, single-handedly locates UBL (as the CIA love to call him) by systematically capturing and torturing his associates. As the years pass and ‘Merica elects a new president, torturing detainees becomes frowned upon. Maya is warned not to be the “last CIA field agent holding a dog collar when the congressional committees start investigating”. This hampers her work no end.
Then she gets a lucky break and dredges up some old information which points her towards a courier who might lead her to Uncle Osama. Months of painstaking fieldwork ensure, along with the sort of storyline and dialogue which were so improbable as to be laughable. Lots of slamming files down on desks and shouting goddamit at people. At one point, she describes herself to the CIA director as, “the motherfucker who found this, Sir”.
The last half hour or so is a very predictable gung-ho set piece featuring black helicopters (sorry – ‘helos’) and a Seal team with lots of guns. You all know the story, so I won’t bore you. Watch out for the bit where the solder who plugs Bin Laden reports his death by radio by saying, “for God and for country”. That was a nice touch.
ZDT is bombast, propaganda and utter, utter horseshit. It glorifies torture but then goes onto prove how it’s possible to triumph even when you’re not allowed to repeatedly make people think they’re being drowned. It’s an appallingly over-simplified narrative – relying on the point of view of a few one-dimensional characters and spectacularly failing to show the massive machine of the United States intelligence services in anything like a realistic light.
