movie reviews Reviews Great Movies Answer Man People Commentary Festivals Oscars Glossary One-Minute Reviews Letters Roger Ebert's Journal Scanners Store News Sports Business Entertainment Classifieds Columnists search ZERO DARK THIRTY (R) Ebert: Users: You: Rate this movie right now GO Search powered by YAHOO! register You are not logged in. Log in » Subscribe to weekly newsletter » times & tickets Zero Dark Thirty in theaters Fandango Search movie BY ROGER EBERT / January 2, 2013 Identity Thief showtimes and buy John Dies at the End tickets. Osama bin Laden is dead, Lost in Thailand Not Yet Begun to Fight which everybody knows, cast & credits Side Effects and the principal facts Small Apartments about us leading up to that are also Stolen Seas well-known. The decision to Maya Jessica Chastain About the site » market "Zero Dark Thirty" Dan Jason Clarke more current releases » as a thriller therefore takes Patrick Joel Edgerton Site FAQs » a certain amount of George Mark Strong one-minute movie reviews courage, even given the Joseph Bradley Kyle Chandler Contact us » fascination with this most Jessica Jennifer Ehle still playing zero and dark of deaths. Justin Chris Platt Email the Movie (The title is spy-speak for Answer Man » Larry Edgar Ramirez The Loneliest Planet "half past midnight," the Wuthering Heights time of bin Laden's death.) Columbia Pictures presents a film 56 Up Amour directed by Kathyrn Bigelow. on sale now The film stars Jessica Broken City Chastain, the ubiquitous Written by Mark Boal. Running Bullet to the Head new star who now time: 157 minutes. Rated R (for The Central Park Five dominates the American strong violence, including brutal Citadel acting landscape. One disturbing images, and for Consuming Spirits could even argue that film is language). Fat Kid Rules the World Jessica Chastain and her Gangster Squad character. She plays Generation P "Maya," a lone wolf CIA Happy People: A Year in the Taiga Hitchcock agent who sticks to her Hyde Park on Hudson Buy now » conviction that bin Laden is Identity Thief not in a cave in Printer-friendly » The Impossible Afghanistan, hunched over E-mail this to a friend » In the Hive a kidney dialysis machine, John Dies at the End but is likely living in Killing Them Softly relatively open sight. The Last Stand Life of Pi In reality, when the terrorist Lost in Thailand was finally tracked down and taken out, the universal astonishment LUV was that his hiding place was a large, walled compound in Mama Buy now » Abbottabad, Pakistan, and that his residence there was relatively The Matchmaker widely known -- in the same area, anyway, as the location of a Movie 43 Zero stars Neighboring Sounds Pakistan military college. New Jerusalem Not Yet Begun to Fight Most of the film involves the search of the allied side, including the Oscar shorts: Animation No star rating tracing down of leads that many Americans considered too obvious Oscar shorts: Live action No star rating and in plain sight to be plausible. To Maya, however, that is the whole Parker beauty of bin Laden's scheme; one is reminded of Poe's "The Playing for Keeps Purloined Letter": It is wise to conceal something in plain sight. What Quartet Buy now » takes imagination is to act on it -- to back her hunch with the impulse Red Dawn to believe it is plausible. Here is a disagreement between the time- Rise of the Guardians honored methods of espionage and a quicker, more intuitive Scrooge & Marley approach involving a hunch too good to be true. approach involving a hunch too good to be true. Side Effects Sister The film's first two hours or so consist of a struggle between the Small Apartments Maya faction and the Maya non-believers, and the stakes are huge in Somewhere Between the decision to pull the trigger. Consider the embarrassment to Stand Up Guys President Barack Obama and his advisers if they had turned out to Starlet be publicly, sensationally, embarrassingly wrong. You can't call in the Stolen Seas Navy SEALs to break into a huge compound on the land of a nation Struck by Lightning Buy now » that is theoretically, anyway, an ally. The administration's subsequent Tales of the Night portrait of those climactic moments and the possibiliy of its being Tiger Tail in Blue wrong are very convincing. The Trouble with the Truth Warm Bodies The subtext deserves a movie of its own, about a disagreement West of Memphis Zero Dark Thirty between macho males who feast on torture and hard-boiled guts, and a woman who depends on more on her intelligence and imagination. more current releases » The leading male characters in the opening of the film are in the tradition of that beloved formula in which an expert team acts together with high tech. Maya, on the other hand, is more like the on dvd Buy now » dutiful female heroine of one of those thrillers set in big business and corporate finance, who uses no privileged intelligence but is willing to new on dvd fly in the face of the way men have always done things. more new on dvd » As Maya, Chastain shows again how versatile an actress she is. Apart from Meryl Streep, who else has appeared in new movies with coming on dvd such a range and ability to convince? Much credit is due to former journalist Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," who begins with facts and not a formula easily more coming on dvd » Buy now » shaped into conventional forms of fiction. I gather that much of his and Bigelow's early preparation for this film took place before it began great movies on dvd to be known (in those shadowy places where such things reside) that the end of this film could not turn out quite as everyone expected. more great movies on dvd » The film's opening scenes are not great filmmaking. They're heavy on jargon and impenetrable calculation, murky and heavy on theory. The parts that everyone now wants to see involve the attack itself. Here the film uses the modern style of underlit Shaky-Cam, with dialogue hard to follow and rapid action in shadows and confusion. We do Buy now» finally see a version of what must have happened, and even see something of bin Laden's face and the moments of his death, and it's all well-enough made, but to paraphrase the MGM slogan, "That's not entertainment." The raid on the compound cannot logically be well-lighted and staged, and the portrayal of bin Laden and the other occupants of his home cannot be based on our knowledge of his personality and motivation, because that's not how the film starts out. Thus the "Zero Buy now» Dark Thirty" raid is not so much a payoff for the events that have been building onscreen, but is a masterstroke of fate. My guess is that much of the fascination with this film is inspired by the unveiling of facts, unclearly seen. There isn't a whole lot of plot -- basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is. The back story is that Bigelow has become a modern-day directorial heroine, which may be why this film is winning even more praise than her masterful Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker." That was a film firmly founded on plot, character and actors whose personalities and Buy now» motivations became well-known to the audience. Its performances are razor-sharp and detailed, the acting restrained, the timing perfect. In comparison, "Zero Dark Thirty" is a slam-bang action picture, depending on Maya's inspiration. One problem may be that Maya turns out to be correct, with a long, steady build-up depriving the climax of much of its impact and providing mostly irony. Do we want to know more about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and the history and political grievances behind them? Yes, but that's not how things turned out. Sorry, but there you have it. 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