Maya is obsessed, and ZDT doesn’t make any judgments about that, either–we understand that she may well be damaging herself and her career in her heedless determination to reach her target, and the film simply presents that as the decision she’s made. She lives for her job, and Chastain’s performance is like a 157-minute held breath, a steely, unrelenting concentration on one goal so single-minded that there’s no room in her head for anything else. Maya is our protagonist, our guide through 2 1/2 hours of complicated intelligence analysis along the road to finding bin-Laden, but we learn practically nothing about her as an individual. A young woman enters the chamber to observe Dan and learn his methods she is Maya (Jessica Chastain). The man interrogating the prisoner is “Dan” (Jason Clarke playing, as almost all the actors do, composites based on real CIA personnel).

Similarly, when the raid against bin-Laden’s compound is presented, the policy of shooting whoever gets in the team’s way, and matter-of-factly making sure they won’t get up again, is presented without comment. By depicting the ugliness unsparingly (none of the characters take any joy from hurting their prisoners–for them it’s just a useful tool) and also its efficacy, the film refuses to make judgments, putting the true story before us and forcing us to make up our own minds.

They believe that it works, and when political considerations deprive them of it as a tactic as the years go on, they miss the ability to practice it. ZDT makes no bones about the fact that whatever the moral concerns may be, its professional interrogator characters believe in torture. “Interrogation” is actually a polite word for what we witness–this is torture, complete with waterboarding and other forms of physical and psychological abuse. When image joins the sound, we’re in a hidden CIA Middle Eastern “black site,” where interrogations are conducted of suspected al-Queda personnel. Kathryn Bigelow’s film, written by Mark Boal (their last collaboration was The Hurt Locker) starts putting us through the wringer at the very start, with audio evoking the horror of 9/11. Sometimes the most satisfying tales start at A and work their way to Z, and such is the case with ZDT, a movie that won’t let us off the hook any more than its heroine will let her target. Night Shyamalan-esque surprise endings, or twisty, tricky narrative structure. You knew how All the President’s Men ended, too, and Apollo 13 and Titanic. You already know how ZERO DARK THIRTY ends. ZERO DARK THIRTY: Worth A Ticket – The Year’s Most Gripping Thriller Is True

Actors in the movie zero dark thirty