Zero Dark Thirty

     Kathryn Bigelow really likes her war movies. And why not? She's pretty good and them. The Hurt Locker was a pretty powerful movie. This one is a close second. There is a flaw, it is about 20 to 30 minutes too long. She moves along pretty well by covering 10 years in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Then she ends by covering about 20 to 30 minutes in about 45. It is the climax of the movie, so lots of attention needs to focus on the details, I get it, but man, I was simply exhausted and this ending really made me remember that.

    I also did not appreciate the ending very much because it kind of ruined Osama Bin Laden's death for me. My understanding of what happened at the compound was that the Navy SEALs had no choice but to kill the people there, included Osama Bin Laden, however, that is not how the movie portrayed the events. Yes, they had to kill some people because they started shooting first, but they did not have to kill everyone there, and they certainly did not have to kill Osama. I'm going to leave it at that and not soap box. Be proud of me.

   Jessica Chastain did a great job. She was haggard, she was a bitch, a lot of bad things happened to her and her friends. She was obsessed. She was everything you'd expect a badass CIA woman who found Bin Laden to be. That being said, I definitely liked Jennifer Lawrence better, but that might be just because I liked her character more. I felt like Jason Clarke was truly the unsung hero of the film. He was fantastic. He played a completely detached CIA operative turned Washington suit excellently and really stole the whole show for me. He was the only character I actually liked in the whole film.

    Like I said, Jessica Chastain was a bitch. She was obsessed with finding Bin Laden, so I was not particularly surprised she did. I was not cheering for her to win, but I was interested in seeing how the whole story played out. Not because I wanted justice to be done, not because I empathized with her, not because I  wanted her to get redeemed and find success. I was interested in the story, not the characters involved in it. Aside from Jason Clarke, I really liked him.

    On the whole, this was well done. And the fact that I did not care about a majority of the characters, but still enjoyed the movie should speak volumes for this movie. Thinking about how that played out, I'm not sure that has ever happened to me before. It really was a good story that was done well under Kathryn Bigelow's proven direction.

    In the end, I give this an 8.5 out of 10. I'm glad I watched it; I will probably watch it again at some point and more than once; I will not own it.