The first ten minutes of a film sets the tone; its purpose is to grab your attention and keep you locked in interest so that the rest of the film can safely unravels before you. The beginning of Zero Dark Thirty had me shivering with goosebumps. It was simply a dark screen with background noise, but the background noise plays a crucial part in reminding the audience the reason why the characters of this film do what they do.
Jessica Chastain plays a CIA agent recruited right out of high school post nine eleven. Her mission throughout the film remains always clear despite the many set back and losses: finding Osama Bin Laden. A very strong lead, Jessica proves to be a tour de force as her character is neither passive nor undermined as a lead. What I really appreciated about this film is the use of her intelligence rather than her sexuality as a tool to find the most wanted and yet elusive man in history. Especially in a male dominated profession where it would be easy for a “female” character to get lost within the story, this character, Mya, always remains steady as a rock. The film never made a big deal about her gender, nor about her competence as a “female” CIA agent, but instead just simply showed the character doing her job.
Within the Bechdel test, which is a great tool to use when reviewing any film from a feminist perspective, Zero Dark thirty passes all three of the requirements. 1. There are at least two women, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something other than men. While the last point is slightly questionable since Maya and her co-worker Jessica do talk about Osama, who is indeed a man, it is done so within a serious and political context. Both of these characters are strong and independent yet they are written perfectly human. As in they have their strengths and they have their weaknesses just like anybody else. It’s not about proving their gender is “better” or capable by saturating them as either hyper-masculine or hyper-sexual. They are not secondary to their environment; they are present in the work that they do and they DO it well.
The torture scenes in the film were a little difficult for me to watch, but only because I normally don’t like that kind of realistic violence. There were moments at the beginning that I felt the scenes lingered on too long, but those scenes are very important at showing the reality of what lengths our government goes to within the context of war, as does any country that had just been attacked. I did not find that it glorified that particular act of violence that perhaps movies like Saving Private Ryan might glorify battle scenes with slow motion and lots of blood and guts etc. The violence in this movie is a character whose arc serves as an important role to the plot of the film. Having said that, it’s still difficult to watch, but that’s point. It is supposed to be difficult; it is supposed to be uncomfortable. This is what war is.
As you will find, if you choose to watch this film that even the Osama raid does not glorify violence to the extent that it could have, but instead it paints the ugly truth that is a mess called war; of what our service men and women endure to protect our country. And of what losses there are on both side of the battlefield. It reminds us how far removed many of us really are or have been from war time experiences, and how involved others have become. But above all that it reminds us that in war it’s not about winning or losing. It is, at its molecular, about survival.
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