As a piece of craft I liked it quite a bit. As an inevitably political piece of art, bound right into recent history and ongoing conflict, I thought it was enormously cynical and nihilistic - but in an honest, perhaps truthful way. There's been a lot of debate about whether this movie supports torture. I think it is a movie that suggests torture is effective. The key piece of information that sets Maya on her obsessive quest comes from a man who has been tortured, and while he gives up this information while being treated kindly, the specter of torture clearly looms over him. In fact, the movie implies that every detainee who gives them information has either been tortured or is operating under the threat or memory of torture. It never says this explicitly, but as a narrative, the only information we receive about the treatment of detainees is 'when you lie, I hurt you.' The same goes for incomplete information.
This is at face value fairly revolting, especially if it's a piece of fiction. Even if Zero Dark Thirty wants to make us uncomfortable by suggesting that this event that we (many of us, at least) cheered was enabled by torture, I still think that's morally dubious. But ultimately I think ZDT can be read as anti-torture, not because the technique itself doesn't work, but because the end goal is worthless.
Nobody in this movie cares much about anything except exigency. The end goal of killing bin Laden is questioned once, and only because bin Laden might no longer be a useful target. When politicians intrude into the narrative, their statements are judged solely by how they'll affect CIA work. The colossal lie of 'WMDs in Iraq' is referenced only as a data point in evaluating the certainty of intelligence estimates. ZDT has been called amoral, but I don't think it is. Its characters, however, certainly are.
Where ZDT's morality and cynicism comes into play is in the evaluation of this amorality. Maya enters the narrative young, fresh. She is immediately 'broken in' by participation in torture. She becomes obsessed with Osama bin Laden, and she pursues that obsession to its end. Along the way she loses her friends to that quest, and becomes so terrified of the world that she shuts off all avenues to a genuinely fulfilling life (turning down the young woman who asks her out because 'it's dangerous out there'). The Pakistanis she lives among, horrified by the collateral damage inflicted by this national obsession, turn first on her station chief and then on her. All Americans in Pakistan are now targets. When the CIA chief asks Maya what she has done of worth other than hunt bin Laden, she answers 'nothing'.
And when she kills bin Laden, she finds nothing. She is alone, with no idea where to go. The death has brought a moment of catharsis but left her completely shattered. And she can only, in the end, participate in this act of vengeance as a voyeur.
I'm obviously trying to draw a parallel between Maya and America here, facile as it is. It's not a deep reading, and in fact I'd call it very nearly textual rather than subtextual. Maya's destructive obsession is America's destructive obsession, and the consequences she faces are ours.
ZDT is a disturbing movie. Watching it I felt like I'd sat down as a citizen of the Empire for a long documentary about stormtroopers. People have called the final act a separate movie, but I'd be seriously put off any critic who says this - thematically it's completely inevitable. Maya even plays bin Laden, in a weird way, fighting a long war over many years just to send her fighters off to actually do the job (in a pair of aircraft, no less - but carrying this metaphor too far makes me feel bad and dumb.) The SEALs are clearly human, but also clearly frightening, their humanity gradually removed until the only glimpse we get is the interface between their night vision goggles and the eyes. Their total anonymity for most of the final sequence, and their creepy name-calling, plays right into the 'faceless mook' cutout we've learned from so many movies.
The real protagonist of that final half hour was, I think, the Pakistani interpreter. When he dropped his megaphone (technological interface, again) and approached the crowd to say 'You have to leave. They'll kill you', I totally lost touch with the idea that ZDT was amoral. The movie might as well have printed that line on a title card and used it as a moral lesson. The Americans might as well have been aliens, come down from on high in vehicles literally built in Area 51, their mission fatal just by proximity.
I thought about science fiction quite a bit while watching ZDT, maybe because of the trailers beforehand in my theater (Side Effects, Oblivion, After Earth among them), but also because ZDT depicted a world populated and run by sociopaths concerned almost entirely with tactical efficiency, more attached to monkeys than men. When the movie ended with a gang of faceless cyborgs efficiently and remorselessly erasing bin Laden, complete with unflinching presentation of screaming innocent children and an interpreter pleading with civilians to, at all costs, stay away from this damaged, ruthless, single-minded woman/nation, I found it every bit as disturbing as the torture.
As a citizen of the United States I'm horrified by a lot of what we've done over the past decade. I think some of it might have been necessary; I don't mourn bin Laden's death, or think he deserved to live. I don't believe 'our troops' are actually sociopathic machines. But here I'm speaking about Zero Dark Thirty, and what it presented. And that's why I think it was a deeply cynical, deeply anti-American film. And that's interesting to me, and valuable, and good - much more so than if Zero Dark Thirty were genuinely apolitical (as if that were possible), or genuinely jingoistic.
As a feminist I also want to say that I think I liked this film's handling of gender. Jessica Chastain completely owned the role, and her character was powerful without being masculinized, professional without being utterly desexualized, obsessive and damaged but never emotionally weak. She found and lost meaningful relationships with women, but the movie didn't flinch from presenting a male-dominated system with a lot of institutional sexism either.
