Zero Dark Thirty

Director Kathryn Bigelow has done a few movies I liked, Near Dark, Blue Steel, and I was one of the few people that loved Strange Days. I didn’t like Hurt Locker and I am not that fascinated like the other critics by Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a good movie but it’s not great. Reason why it is not great because at over 2 hours long you don’t ever get to know who the lead character is? The movie is a chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.

The best part of the movie is the end where Bigelow recreates how Osama bin Laden was executed. It takes into fact everything we have heard and read about how it went down. Not sure there will be another movie that will be able to recreate this event as good as Bigelow does. That part of the movie is really all you need to see. The rest focuses on torture methods and Maya, Jessica Chastain’s, relentless pursuit of Osama.

The flaw in this movie is that the audience never gets to know what drives Maya’s character. Did she have someone die on 9/11? Why was her life so private in the movie? For 157 mins. long Bigelow could have given us a little more insight.

Verdict:
It’s like King Kong and Titanic but not anywhere in its class. You know that the ship and the ape are going down but you want to be entertained before it happens, and you want to know and care about the characters. You don’t get that in Zero Dark Thirty.