Kathryn Bigelow's brilliant film begins in absolute darkness. As the voices of first responders, 911 callers, and voicemails of those trapped in the Twin Towers echo over the black of the theater, it's not hard to feel the uncertainty, panic, and fear of this blank unknownness. For the film's two and one-half hour duration, the darkness doesn't dissipate, but swells as characters die, as interrogations commence, as terrorist leaders are captured and give the American operatives names, places, and lies that eventually guide them to Osama Bin Laden. Many consider the film, The Hurt Locker with a girl; the implication that Bigelow returns to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and treads the same ground and gives no new meaning to the desolation and ache of America's first war of the 2000's. But to say that this film is a retread, an imitation of her own previous work, is to say that Shakespeare's Henrys and Richards were artistic redundancies.
Far from the front lines of battle and the bomb squads of The Hurt Locker, Maya is plunged into the amorality of interrogation and intelligence. As she watches men waterboarded and tortured, she stands strong, and at other times crumples under the weight of her duty. In her office she receives the news that her friends are dead, of the bombings in London; in a meeting after work, the foreign wars break into the sphere of her daily life. She earns scars of combat and sees her own blood shed.
In all of her actions Maya is certain of one thing: the tip that she received from one prisoner is the key to Bin Laden. As her superior officers doubt her diligent following of her interrogation's one thread, Maya only grows more certain. When a clue finally breaks and she is able to pursue it, she takes what is perhaps the film's only moral stand on following her lead. In a film that begins in darkness and sees its third act submerged in a Pakistani night, Maya's certainty over the importance of her intelligence, stands as a luminous truth in desert of moral desolation.
The shortsightedness of some to see this as a pro-torture film, denies the brilliance of its own exploration of darkness. From the film's introduction, to the torture, to the murder of innocent wives at its conclusion, Zero Dark Thirty explores certain horrors of the human condition. Certainty, in morality, in belief, is what drives the engines of war, of terror. As we stand in our right – the belief that the terrorists must die, the horror of 9/11 must not repeated – we enter the same darkness of our enemy, an enemy that in its moral certainty, its conviction, saw the United States as an affront to their God, their way of life. The night of the film's conclusion stands as an illuminating allegory of right, wrong, murder, and certainty. As blood is spilled, we celebrate the capture of America's Public Enemy Number One. But as a wife falls over the body of her dead husband, do we stand in the moral right: is this woman's life any different than the 3,000 taken on 9/11?
But Bigelow's film does not answer our questions. Posed in the darkness, these questions remain as free-floating and alive at the film's conclusion as at its beginning. Maya claims her light, her certainty, when she fights for her attack on Bin Laden's safe house, but as the film comes to a close and she stands in the light of an Afghani day, she lets tears fall down her face. She waits for the plane's bay doors to close, for the darkness to return. Zero Dark Thirty does not stake any moral ground, but it does illuminate truths about moral right, religious fervor, and the moral blackness that humanity confronts in all of its wars, whether in the Middle East or in the day-to-day grind of an intelligence office. Zero Dark Thirty is a time we all know, a time when we stand at the convergence of our beliefs and must weigh life against life and truth agains truth. Bigelow just had the courage to give this dark hour of our human experience a name.
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