For two and a half hours, it progresses steadily through the history of what it tags "the greatest manhunt in history," centering the struggle on the figure of Maya. The film stages itself as a truthful retelling of the heart of the mission to find and kill Osama Bin Laden and does just that, without much adornment or digression. There is little in terms of character interaction, obvious choices, and action. Instead, there is a series of facts that build upon one another - leads found by Maya, chances lost to passing time, sources unconvinced by interrogation, friends lost to bombings - which, as a whole, build a saga that spans almost a decade.
I find it hard to recount the story of Zero for it largely lacks a narrative. We are told she looks tired and worn down, but Chastain always remains pale and perfect, a strange vessel for such grand and grotesque goals. Over the course of the film she neither seems to age nor relent in her hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Maya is repeatedly referred to as a "killer" by her peers we are first introduced to her in a torture scene. The main character in Zero is Maya (played boldly by Jessica Chastain, a rising star who first gained acclaim in The Tree of Life), a CIA operative who is in many ways similar to the bomb-diffusing lead of The Hurt Locker. Once more, she hones in on a protagonist that the audience might be afraid to call a hero: an individual who pursues their goal single-mindedly, to the point of self-destruction. She deals with these issues again in Zero Dark Thirty. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat." Speaking of The Hurt Locker, she stated, "War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. Praised for her gritty realism and unflinching take on the military and our American obsession with war, Bigelow seems to be developing a trademark kind of film. Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, has not strayed far from the movie that earned her that accolade, 2008's Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker. For its first few seconds, Zero is a pictureless document of terror, and justified with the cry "I'm going to die, aren't I?" the film begins. No images are needed to remind audiences of the date they were recorded - September 11, 2001. Zero Dark Thirty starts chillingly with voices played over an empty frame.
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