ongoing

     Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” starts with a black screen, and all we get is sound. Sounds from the World Trade Center Sept. 11, 2001 – panic, hope, desperation, silence. And then we move on into the hunt … It’s effective. No need for visuals here. We all know what happened.

    There’s been so much advance chatter about “Zero Dark Thirty.” Now that it’s out (in Boston, after it opened last year for Oscar consideration in bigger towns) let’s say two things it is not:

    * A torture porn movie, a real-life “Saw.” Oh, it sorta starts that way, at a so-called “black site” where a terrorist named Ammar (Reta Kateb) is getting, stretched, pulled and boarded. It’s effectively unpleasant, loud and squirm-inducing, and you both wince and root for the good cop/bad cop role played by CIA agent Dan (Jason Clark). And there are few more grueling scenes – prisoner in a box, pants-less prisoner being walked like a dog – but Bigelow (and writer Mark Boal) take their foot off the torture pedal fairly early on. Thankfully. And in retrospect, it could have been worse. We’ve seen worse.

     * A rah-rah we-got-him movie about the triumphant pursuit and killing of Osama Bin Laden. When the end finally comes – it’s about a half-hour of helicoptering into the compound and assault, much of seen through the green-lit night vision goggles of the Navy SEALs – it comes as a loud, chaotic, heart-pounding room-to-room search and destroy (or capture) mission. But there’s not glory; there are no chest bumps or fist pumps. Or, put another way, it’s the movie you would expect from the woman who did “The Hurt Locker.” It’s both dramatic and even-keel. It’s chaotic, the fog of war not exactly yielding the kind of results most other movie-makers have given us over the years. The hunt, of course, is inherently dramatic (even if the outcome is, well, known.). There’s fascination in how the pieces of the puzzle are assembled, how leads turn dead, how connections are finally made. And it’s also helter-skelter enough so that we’re not quite sure how those links are made – all those similar-sounding names and bearded Al Qaeda bastards. How do you keep this pursuit on course? What is the course? It is a long haul for everyone, nearly a decade to get bin Laden and 157 minutes for us.

      The movie’s heroine is Maya, played Jessica Chastain, a brilliant actress who does glam and plain equally well. Here, she’s plain. She’s the point-person on this hunt and when, in a conference deep in the movie, as the CIA heads are discussing how certain everyone is that the compound they’ve identified as being bin Laden’s (as opposed to some other bad guy) really is his, CIA director (James Gandolfini) asks exactly who she is. She replies, “I’m the motherfucker who found this place.” The audience I watched it with responded with hearty applause here and it is that kind of line. But the audience didn’t go wild when the take-down happened, again, in sync with Bigelow’s depiction of this as a necessary and risky action that had to be undertaken. In fact, you’re not really going to see bin Laden’s face, just as President Obama wanted it in real life. You see a glimpse of the photograph the SEALs have taken of him; you see an angled shot of his corpse (just a view of his nose, taken horizontally from below his feet) after his body has been removed from the destroyed compound. This is when Maya is able to confirm that it is indeed bin Laden.

    Maya’s character is based on the main source for the movie, an un-named woman who remains un-named as she still works for the CIA. In a sense, this is her story about the pursuit, and the film ends when her role is over and she’s on the sole passenger on a military plane on the way to … somewhere. Mission accomplished, mission over. What now?

     Bigelow has said in interviews that this is not meant to be a documentary-like recreation and that the torture-leading-to-bin Laden scenario may not be exactly the way it took place.  Those involved in the hunt have said most emphatically that water-boarding etc. did not yield information that led to bin Laden. Bigelow’s counter is that she wanted to show that the torture happened – that it was a key part of the Bush era strategy, continued under Obama – and even if it didn’t directly lead to bin Laden it was part of the mosaic of the attempt. It makes for good debate, and, for me, made me think of various Vietnam War movies (“Apocalypse Now,”  “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Deer Hunter” and “The Hanoi Hilton” – I reviewed that latter one for the Boston Globe) and whatever sort of truth we assigned to them given what we knew or suspected we knew.

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