In my first review of the week, I’ll be discussing the hotly-tipped, widely commended drama/thriller Zero Dark Thirty.
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler & James Gandolfini
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Rating: ★★½
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| Maya (Chastain) ponders what to do next... |
About the Movie
Everyone in cinema loves Kathryn Bigelow at the moment. And I don’t know why. Of course I like some of her early films such as Near Dark and Point Break, but I thought that The Hurt Locker was a slow-paced and boring pile of crap: a film that definitely did not deserve to win Best Picture or Best Director at the Academy Awards. Seeing men wrestle naked and then pour their wives a cup of coffee did not fill me with any kind of inspiration. But everyone else loved it for some bizarre reason.
And because of The Hurt Locker’s success, everyone is now jumping on the Zero Dark Thirty bandwagon. I wanted to see if it exceeded The Hurt Locker in blandness, or if it was actually deserving of its near universal acclaim.
Zero Dark Thirty is better than The Hurt Locker, as it is a sort of thriller about a CIA officer’s unrelenting quest to track down Osama bin Laden, but it isn’t great. For some reason or another, it has been widely critically praised and has been nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress. I find this strange, mainly because the film is not particularly interesting or exciting, isn’t very well structured or involving, and Jessica Chastain is not in the film as much as she probably should be.
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| Maya plays it cool... most of the time. |
The Plot
The movie begins with an incredibly elaborate and slightly unnecessary torture sequence. If you are a fan of the television series 24, then this opening won’t particularly faze you, which probably isn’t a good thing, as being conditioned to watching and accepting this type of ritual humiliation and violence is almost certainly psychologically destructive.
After this, Maya (Chastain) goes on a hunt around the Middle East, searching high and low for the elusive bin Laden, with the help of her (expendable) friends. Even though we know what will happen in the end, we have to wait a hell of a long time to get to it, and when we do, we are treated to half an hour of jerky night vision goggle point of view camera work in an incredibly boring and dry action sequence that seems completely disjointed from the rest of the movie. This final act is by far and away the weakest moment, as it goes on for way too long and is incredibly tedious- it isn’t at all as exciting as it should be.
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| The U.S. Navy SEALs launch their attack |
Saying that, the build-up to Maya’s success is, at times, thrilling and interesting. Zero Dark Thirty mainly consists of Maya watching people being tortured, interviewing terrorists, sitting at her desk, asking people to go on stake outs for her, and her friends being blown up.
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| This happens for a lot of the movie's running time... |
The Best/Worst Moments
Even though I thought that Jessica Chastain was fantastic in The Help, in Zero Dark Thirty she doesn’t really get the chance to show off her acting chops. This is mostly because she spends her screen time reflecting on events, watching other people, and sitting in subdued silence. I’m sure that some drama orientated people might tell me that this is ‘reacting’ rather than ‘acting’, and sure she does it well, but does she deserve to be nominated for an Oscar for this?
She does have moments of feminine ‘episodes’, when she metaphorically explodes (not literally, like her colleagues) and screams at her boss. But this is really the only point that we see her humanity, and it only lasts for a few minutes.
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| Maya loves to argue with her boss... |
Jennifer Ehle gives a very powerful and dominating supporting performance, but the rest of the cast are lost in the murky and incredibly simplistic yet simultaneously complicated plot, with Kyle Chandler being the only other thespian to really stand out enough to be memorable.
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| Jennifer Ehle gives the film's best performance |
The ending really does ruin the film in many ways, because it is poorly filmed, badly executed and, on the whole, boring. After two hours of seeing Maya dedicate her entire life to hunting down bin Laden, we just want to see him caught, but instead we have to wait an extra half an hour, which is spent with US Navy SEALs bumbling around in the dark and then killing people.
In Summary…
Overall, Zero Dark Thirty is an over-rated, over inflated and over-long pseudo-thriller, with a wafer thin plot that is strung together by the central character’s presence. Parts of it are good, particularly the moments with explosions and/or Jennifer Ehle, but the entire film is ruined by the weak, boring and vomit inducing shaky-camera ending. The final shot, in which Maya cries, is pretty potent, but should have packed more of a punch.
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| I was bored too.. |
Should it win Best Picture?
Definitely not.
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