As the first reviews pour in for director Kathryn Bigelow's latest, "Zero Dark Thirty," the film looks poised to dominate the awards season with its reportedly frank, brutal and captivating portrayal of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Taking its title from the military jargon for the time of the raid on bin Laden's compound, the film's sprawling cast stars Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau, Edgar Ramirez, and James Gandolfini, among many others. With Bigelow and Boal' unprecedented access to classified CIA documents regarding the bin Laden manhunt, "Zero Dark Thirty" is being billed by many as a "reported film" that blurs the lines between stark truth and fiction so compeliing it feels real.
Helmed by filmmaker Kathyrn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker," "Near Dark") and writing partner, journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal ("The Hurt Locker"), so far, "Zero Dark Thirty" is one of the best-reviewed films of 2012, already garnering four Golden Globe nominations, and amassing a current score of 93 percent on movie review website Rotten Tomatoes.
The Atlantic thought "Zero Dark Thirty" perfected the style Bigelow and Boal began developing with their last project, "The Hurt Locker" and claims it's the best film of the year.
"Judged purely on cinematic grounds, 'Zero Dark Thirty' is a tour de force, and the best film of the year. Bigelow and Boal's prior collaboration, 'The Hurt Locker,' was extraordinary in its execution but relatively narrow in its ambitions, a series of snapshots from a life lived at unthinkable extremes. With 'Zero Dark Thirty,' the filmmakers bring the same meticulous eye and sense of harrowing immediacy to a story of vastly greater scope," wrote The Atlantic in its review.
"'Zero Dark Thirty' is, like the story it chronicles, a sprawling enterprise-one that, unlike so many other offerings of this holiday season, earns every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time...As for Bigelow herself, her direction is vital, controlled, enthralling. If 'The Hurt Locker' cracked the door on her cinematic gifts, 'Zero Dark Thirty' kicks it wide open. Boal's script, meanwhile, is a comparable marvel, gripping yet utterly authentic... With 'Zero Dark Thirty,' Bigelow and Boal have produced a powerful, morally complicated work on an urgent subject. It is a film that deserves-that almost demands-to be seen and argued over," The Atlantic concluded.
The Los Angeles Times thought Bigelow's direction made ostensibly boring behind-the-scenes CIA work surprisingly mesmerizing.
"Following up on her Oscar-winning 'The Hurt Locker,' director Kathryn Bigelow proves herself once again to be a master of heightened realism and narrative drive in this retelling of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden... You know you're watching a movie when what was doubtless a tremendously tedious process in real life is made as exciting as all get-out. This salute to what one character calls 'big breaks and the little people who make them happen' is an example of cinematic storytelling at its most effective." Said the Los Angeles Times.
Leonard Maltin was also surprised that a movie so involved with the cold, thankless procedures of conducting a modern manhunt was so compelling, crediting Bigelow's swift directing and Boal' journalistic writing tone with much of the film's success, and says Chastain's performance is easily one of the best this year.
"What makes the movie so effective is its protagonist, a doggedly determined CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain, who never loses sight of her goal in spite of repeated setbacks and bouts of political in-fighting... 'Zero Dark Thirty' is never dry or repetitious. What we get is a clear-eyed picture of just how difficult and frustrating it is to search for a needle in a haystack. We also see how luck has its place in the world of espionage-though as the old saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get," wrote Maltin in his review.
"... It's Jessica Chastain who anchors the film and carries it home for us. In a film that avoids Hollywood histrionics, to immerse us in a world we know little about, this was perhaps the filmmakers' best decision. Once you get past the headlines, the spin, and the mountain of details, the search for bin Laden was about people-gutsy, hard-working, hard-headed people like the one Chastain embodies so well," he added.
"Zero Dark Thirty" is in theaters now.
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