Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Wake up, babe, we found bin Laden
Good evening everyone. It’s 1900 Eastern Standard Time, and the mission begins now. Additional details are Top Secret, so keep your head down and read on!
Previews
What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?
Ellen: I know there will be Jessica Chastain, I know there will be Chris Pratt, and I know they’ll get bin Laden.
Tyler: Hey another one I’ve actually seen! I recall being intrigued by the subject matter (given that the actual events had happened not too long before this came out) and the director (given her past success with The Hurt Locker) going into it and not being disappointed coming out of it: the acting, the pacing, the tension all stood out. Having now also seen A House of Dynamite I’m starting to realize that that’s a hallmark of Kathryn Bigelow movies.
Plots & Feelings
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L.s Team 6 in May 2011.
Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):
A black screen beckons us to listen to the horrors of 9/11 through news reports and 911 calls. It’s very bad.
Cut to 2003, where a man named Ammar is being interrogated as part of the euphemistically-named “detainee program”1 at a CIA black site. Grim and grungy CIA officer Dan Fuller is leading the charge, and fresh-from-D.C. analyst Maya is observing. She’s rather overdressed in a full suit for the questioning and waterboarding, but she takes it in stride to the extent that she can. Despite the enhanced interrogation techniques, so to speak, they are gaining no more reliable insight into the 9/11 hijackers or the future plans of al-Qaeda as a whole. As the days progress, eventually Maya is left alone with Ammar, and he begs for help. She retorts that he can help himself by being truthful, successfully letting him and the audience know that she will not be empathetic to his plight by virtue of her gender.
Ellen: Even this “movie magic” depiction of waterboarding is horrifying.
Tyler: It’s really effective because it doesn’t cut away that much, so it feels like the movie is forcing you to watch it in its entirety and be a part of it. Normally we get an audience stand-in, but to your point in the last sentence, Maya is definitively NOT that.
Tyler: Also, Dan is played by Jason Clarke and he was just such perfect casting.
In May 2004, there’s a deadly attack on a bank in Saudi Arabia. Maya has the idea to bluff Ammar about the result, because given that he’s in chains in a black box at a black site, he has no idea if the attack was “successful” or not. Dan and Maya have a very weird lunch with Ammar, making him believe they thwarted the Saudi Arabia attack. As he eats solid food for the first time in who knows how long, Ammar tells them about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a personal courier to Osama bin Laden. Maya points out that this is a wartime name, not a real one, but the idea sticks with her.
Ellen: I have no idea to what degree this is based on real info from detainees, but Ammar uses the word “turf,” which feels really unlikely for him to be using, unless he learned all of his English from shady Americans, which I suppose is possible.
Maya cracks into the CIA archives, scanning for any mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and she finds myriad detainee videos mentioning this man. The man I refer to in my notes as the CIA “big boss” in Pakistan, Joseph Bradley, is not impressed with intelligence that is not actionable. In July 2005, the London bombings occur, targeting the transit system. Seemingly in response, the Americans capture Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a senior member of al-Qaeda. He denies knowing anything about someone named Abu Ahmed, much to Maya’s frustration. She asks Dan to have a crack at it, but he declines, saying he needs to do something normal for a while. Dan returns to D.C., with the last ominous warning to Maya that she doesn’t want to be “the last one holding the dog collar2 when the oversight committee comes.”
In September 2008, Maya meets up with her fellow CIA officer and friend Jessica for dinner at a Marriott3 in Islamabad. After discussing how Maya has not and will not hook up with a coworker, 2000 lbs of explosives go off, leaving a 10 meter crater where the front of the hotel used to be. Despite this setback, Jessica is hyped, because she has discovered the Jordanians have a mole in al-Qaeda. The man is a highly-placed doctor in the organization, and for a very casual $25 million4 he’ll give up top officials.
Due to disputes on where to meet, Jessica sets up a rendezvous at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan. Maya monitors from … the monitors, while Jessica gets her time to shine. Unfortunately for her, this doctor is a triple agent, which reduces down to: he’s loyal to al-Qaeda and detonates a suicide vest. Jessica and several other CIA officers are killed. Maya is heartbroken, but it leads her to redouble her efforts on Abu Ahmed and bin Laden.
Ellen: I have in my notes “[Jessica] is so excited, it has to be a bad sign.” I’ve seen a few movies in my day…
Ellen: Okay fine I called her “Bangs.” This is a movie that does not care if you don’t keep up, and I missed her name.
The CIA group gets chewed out for not making enough progress, being told that there’s no other group secretly working on al-Qaeda: they’re it. Several agents pass information to Maya about Abu Ahmed, some of which conflicts as to if he’s even alive or not, but she’s very much established herself as “the person who cares about this dude.” One such file leads Maya to a new theory: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti is probably a man named Ibrahim Sayeed. This info came from Morocco after 9/11, but due to human error and the paperwork shuffle, it was lost until now. Maya shares her insights with Dan, believing that the man who reported burying “Ahmed” actually buried his brother. Dan puts himself back into the field, kind of: he goes to a club in Kuwait to meet up with a prince who exchanges the Sayeed family’s phone number for a Lamborghini Gallardo Bicolore. Casual.
Bradley does not find this phone number to be worth pursuing, and Maya, um, vehemently disagrees. She and her team in Pakistan manage to get the phone number they believe to be Ibrahim’s based on calls to his mother, despite his use of tradecraft. The field team eventually identifies his car as well, and after a lot of road-watching, that car leads them to a compound in Abbottabad. Maya unfortunately learns of this remotely from D.C., having been sent back after gunmen attacked her home.
The CIA puts the compound under surveillance but is unable to confirm that bin Laden is in residence. Though no longer in Pakistan, Maya is far from sidelined, keeping a running count of how many days since they’ve found the compound on her boss’s door and watching the surveillance footage. This surveying pays off, because they find evidence that a third, reclusive man is also living in the house. The team from the CIA explains to the President’s National Security Advisor all of the ways they’ve tried to verify the man’s identity, but none are certain. While making a hypothetical plan to attack the compound, the CIA Director asks for levels of certainty around the table that bin Laden is in the compound. The team comes back with 60-80%, except for Maya, who says 95%.5
And we all know where we’re heading next:
Abbottabadoh I’m so sorry, Area 51?? Maya and Co. are there to meet with SEAL Team Six and check out some crazy stealth helicopters that look like the unholy union of a rhino and a Cybertruck (check out Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat? for a pic). Maya didn’t want people involved at all and would have rather dropped a bomb, but here we are. The men aren’t exactly impressed with the intelligence either, but Maya’s confidence is tough to argue with. The gang sets up shop in Afghanistan and waits until the cover of night for the mission to begin.
On May 2, 2011, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flies two stealth helicopters from Afghanistan into Pakistan with members of SEAL Team Six, the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and at least one working dog6 to raid the compound. One of the choppers crashes, but they manage to keep the mission on track. The SEALs gain entry and kill several people in the compound, including a man whom they believe is bin Laden. After retrieving as much intelligence as they can, the team returns to Afghanistan, and Maya confirms the identity of the corpse. Soon afterwards, Maya boards a military transport plane and begins to cry.
Tyler: Even though we all know how it’s going to end, the tension in this climactic sequence is, as expected, fantastic. Part of that is done by dropping out the score completely, so the only sounds you hear are what the SEALs make. Notably, the first bit of score we get after the raid is a pretty somber one as we see the non-OBL bodies of those who got shot in the process. It’s not soaring triumphant “rah-rah, we got the mofo!” music, but it makes you linger on the instances where they had to shoot all these other people multiple times.
Intermission
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Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?
Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.
Zero Dark Thirty’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:
The term “zero dark thirty” is a military term for early morning before dawn, and according to director Kathryn Bigelow was also meant to evoke the “darkness and secrecy that cloaked the entire decade-long mission.”
Ellen: Having worked night shifts in an organization that uses 24 hour clocks, I’m familiar with the term, though it doesn’t get used that often in the decidedly non-military context of the ISS. My favorite nickname for a time is “all balls,” meaning 00:00 or midnight.
By the time it was announced in May 2011 that Osama bin Laden was killed, Bigelow and co-writer Mark Boal (with whom she also worked on The Hurt Locker) had already finished a screenplay centered on the 2001 Battle of Tora Bora and the long, unsuccessful efforts to find bin Laden in that region. While they essentially started from scratch on the writing, they were still able to leverage existing counter-terrorism sources for what would eventually become ZDT.
The character of Maya (portrayed by Jessica Chastain in the movie) is a composite of several different CIA officers, including the controversial Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, who writer Jane Mayer dubbed “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” in a December 2014 piece in The New Yorker.
The film stirred up several controversies, including allegations of favoring the use of torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”), not consulting the family members of those whose 911 phone calls begin the movie, and improper access of classified information. In a hilariously accidental-but-definitely-improper disclosure of classified information, CIA Director Leon Panetta disclosed “Secret” and “Top Secret” information about the bin Laden raid in a June 2011 speech at CIA Headquarters. Unbeknownst to Panetta, one of the roughly 1,300 people present at the ceremony was ZDT co-writer Mark Boal.
Tyler: I found criticisms around ZDT’s implied endorsement of torture to be completely misguided and simplistic, as it’s never shown to actually leading to accurate and actionable intelligence. If anything, Maya gets her best intel when she’s bluffing her prisoner and feeding him well. Not showing it, when it did in fact occur, would, in director Kathryn Bigelow’s words, “be whitewashing history.” Just because it’s shown does not necessarily imply that it was a direct cause of the ultimate success.
Along with Best Picture, ZDT was nominated for four other Oscars (Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, and Best Film Editing). It won for Best Sound Editing, a win it shared with Skyfall, which made it only the sixth tie in Oscars history and the first since 1994.
Ellen: For once in my life I took note of the sound editing (I think) because such a deal is made about the quietness of these crazy helicopters, and it sounded (to my deeply untrained ear) very convincing.
Tyler: Absolutely, the low whir of the rotors was quite evident.
Fill In The Blank
How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?
Ellen: I’d like to give The Academy a Lambo, they’ve earned it! Kathryn does not mess around. This is what I have learned. She is a master at building and holding tension with every movie-making tool at her disposal, which is really saying something when your viewing of ZDT is interrupted by internet outages, popcorn refills, Netflix ads, and parental commentary7. Nevertheless, the story still felt a little disjointed to me, as I’m sure the actual process was. This movie was also much more about the process (movie-fied though it was) than the actual raid, which is not how I thought it would be. Perhaps I was too influenced by Tyler’s original Spreadsheet comment that referenced our introduction to “buff Chris Pratt.” That is not a dig, however, because I think learning about the twists, turns, deliberate misdirection and straight up mistakes makes for a more interesting story than half the movie being “guys with guns.” Remind me not to get on the CIA’s bad side, please!
Tyler: I’d like to assist The Academy in capturing its white whale/bin Laden equivalent. I’m happy to report that I think this movie still holds up! Just like the first time I watched this (as I mentioned in the Preview section above), I was incredibly impressed by the acting, pacing, and tension that Kathryn Bigelow was able to pull together. The pacing in particular I thought was great given that the story plays out over a decade, and you really start to feel the desperation as Maya tries to chase down her lead. And while movies like this will basically always be dramatized in one way or another to fit in a two-ish-hour script, in reading through the actual events (or at least what’s been publicized) it’s clear the writers did their homework and seemed to make a good faith effort at being at least somewhat historically accurate. While I typically ding movies for taking too many liberties with historical events, I’m much more willing to grade on a curve when it does so many other things well (and, ya know, when the truth might be highly classified).
Let The Credits Roll
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Post-Credits Scene
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Sounds like my ex-wife!
Spoilers for “Wuthering Heights”!
Tyler: I recently learned that this is actually pronounced “MARRY-it” not “mary-OTT.”
Ellen: This is why I’ll never get status.
That’s pushing $50 million in today’s triple-crosses!
Technically she says 100% but modifies down to 95% because she knows “certainty freaks you guys out.”
Ellen: Love you, Dad, sorry for scolding you!