Got together with Jim, Crissy, and the Fenris boys to watch Zero Dark Thirty last night. Haven’t seen them in a while and I couldn’t recall the names of half of them :P But there we were waiting for everyone to arrive, having dinner, talking about the things we used to talk back then, and of course, watching a movie of common interest.
Make no mistake, Zero Dark Thirty is not an action movie about a SEAL Team assaulting UBL hideout and ending him with extreme prejudice. It is primarily a spy thriller with a sort-of-action segment towards the end. It’s about “Maya”, a female CIA agent, on her single-minded 10-year search for UBL aka the needle in the haystack, her struggles in a male-dominated workplace, brute-force approach (yes, torture), bureaucracy ridden government, unreliable allies, and the culmination of the search with an efficient little raid a little-known city in Pakistan. There’s a lot of social and political commentary somewhere there but I chose to ignore them.
Towards the end, the narrative of the movie sort of weaves in with the narrative of the book No Easy Day. For example, the female CIA operative leading the search and the way the raid unfolds. So having read the book helped me understand and appreciate the events as it unfolded on the big screen. Makes me wonder if Mark Owen/Matt Bissonette is a technical adviser for the movie.
I’m kind of a Kathryn Bigelow fan because of The Hurt Locker and her latest work didn’t hurt. Definitely a good watch whether you’re a spy thriller fan or an mil action fan.
Rating: 4/5