My review of Zero Dark Thirty

Let me just start off by saying I think this film is the best movie of 2012. In fact, it's probably the closest to perfection a movie has come since 2006's United 93 - ironically another movie related to 9/11.

And speaking of 9/11, Zero Dark Thirty opens with a montage of audio clips from that particular day before flash forwarding two years to a secret CIA prison in Saudi Arabia. Here, two CIA agents named Dan (Jason Clarke) and Maya (Jessica Chastain) forcibly interrogate an imprisoned Al-Qaeda operative on Bin Laden's whereabouts. While the man cannot give him the location of Bin Laden, he does drop a name that will become instrumental to the greatest manhunt in human history.

Jessica Chastain is the driving force behind this movie. She delivers a solid performance that warrants an Oscar nomination. She's cold, calculating, and driven. During the interrogation scenes at the beginning of the movie, the terrorist pleads with her to help him. With jaw firm and arms folded, her character Maya simply replies: "You can help yourself by giving us what we want."

While the movie is Chastain's we meet quite a few solid actors along the way, such as the aforementioned Jason Clarke who plays Maya's partner, 'Dan'. Other performances of note are Jennifer Ehle as 'Jessica', Kyle Chandler as section chief Joseph Bradley, and Mark Strong as 'George'. While all of these characters are fictionally named, they are supposedly based on real-life people who worked on the Bin Laden manhunt. The only two characters in this film who seem to be entirely non-fictional are Chandler's Joseph Bradley and James Gandolfini's Leon Panetta.

The film is perfectly paced. There are literally no moments in this film where I felt it dragged, and that is saying something given its 2 1/2 hour run time. The best part of the film is without a doubt the raid on the Bin Laden compound which stays surprisingly faithful to the official story of the raid. Usually Hollywood would try to add a few more gun fights and explosions to make the truth more dramatic then what it really was, but Kathryn Bigelow does a fantastic job with historical accuracy here.

And speaking of Bigelow, I feel as if this is her best work as a director thus far. I found her work on The Hurt Locker to be vastly overrated, however her work in Zero Dark Thirty is more than deserving of an Oscar should she happen to win next month. Mark Boal's screenplay is also better and more polished this time around than it was in The Hurt Locker.

Final Verdict: Zero Dark Thirty is the best film of 2012. It features an incredible performance by Jessica Chastain and brilliant writing and directing from Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow respectively; a technical triumph.

Grade: A+