Although I, along with the rest of the cinema audience, knew the outcome it did not prevent us from being utterly transfixed by Zero Dark Thirty. In short, it was riveting.
The movie ends with the siege of Bin Laden’s hideaway by Navy SEALs, much of it shot to approximate the queasy, weirdly-unreal green of night-vision goggles. Zero Dark Thirty does not explicitly say whether torture is a means to an end or an inhuman action. This is the quality that makes Zero Dark Thirty something close to a masterpiece.
The film shows its audience the secret history of spy craft that led from September 11th, to the Bin Laden raid in May 2011 without steering us explicitly towards a moral verdict.
The story hinges on Maya who is more ambivalent protagonist than traditional heroine. She is introduced during an interrogation. During this scene the prisoner is subjected to simulated drowning and forced inside a horrifyingly small box. The violence is ugly, stark, almost businesslike and is largely presented without music cues. These torture scenes linger, casting a long, dreadful shadow over all that comes after. The moment that captured me was the vivid juxtaposition between the void of September 11th voices and the lone man strung up in a cell.
It is also a heartbreakingly sad, soul-shaking story about revenge and its moral costs. The non-triumphant ending epitomises the pain of the film -the suffering, the compromised ideals- it has all led to this. Years from now everyone will still remember this film.
Verdict: 9/10