And she generally gets the best out of actors. The final sequence in particular is harrowingly tense, even though we know the outcome. Bigelow's directorial talent is never in doubt. For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and. There's a fair amount of distracting spot-the-cameo going on, particularly toward the end, when Joel Edgerton, Mark Duplass and James Gandolfini turn up. 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. Jennifer Ehle uses her moon-faced radiance to good effect, filling her eager operative Jessica with youthful energy. Driven professionals in films often come across as stolid, but Chastain is an actor of subtlety - even if Bigelow can't help lensing her like a wind-swept movie star in the Middle Eastern magic light. Jessica Chastain delivers a nuanced performance. Clarke is solid but lost amidst superior talent, as he was in John Hillcoat's recent Lawless. In Bigelow's world, it's the suits in Washington who have the blood in their hands - they're disconnected, as evidenced when torture-specialist Dan (Jason Clarke) returns to US headquarters from the field and loses his nerve, becoming a man of soft probabilities. It shows what it's allowed to show, but keeps their secrets ("undisclosed location" and all that) and it portrays the operatives as the honourable front-liners getting their hands dirty (but not bloody), beyond moral reproach by virtue of hard graft. But Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow's disinterest is also a curse because, in avoiding judgement, it surreptitiously falls firmly on the side of the CIA. Usually when a narrative is made ostensibly apolitical it's as a result of an unconvincing moral rebalancing, where the filmmakers go to great lengths to present both sides fairly. It's a blessing because it's rare that a film dealing with such volatile subject matter is depicted procedurally. The film's lack of polemic is both a blessing a curse. ZERO DARK THIRTY reunites the Oscar-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (2009, Best Picture, THE HURT LOCKER) for the story of historys greatest manhunt for the worlds most dangerous man. We simply get to see what (apparently) happened during the manhunt for "UBJ". What Zero Dark Thirty does have is a narrative based on first-hand accounts, and it makes no explicit judgement about the content of those accounts.
This film, however, is based on real-life events, so it doesn't have the benefit of being able to withhold in the way Homeland's first series did with Twin Peaks-like delectation. Zero Dark Thirty is a procedural CIA-based thriller in the mould of TV's Homeland.