Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a sticky stripe of action-thriller, as troubled as it is troubling. The film presents the search for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden—and his ultimate demise by Navy SEAL—as a kind of vengeful pop entertainment. As such, it carries a tang of jingoism, which is perhaps inevitable in an American-made narrative feature about the manhunt for al-Qaeda's founder. Nonetheless, while Zero Dark Thirty engages in shameless glorification (though not glamorization) of CIA spycraft, as well as a bit of Michael Bay-style military book-licking, the film is markedly grim, chilly, and ambiguous—hardly a rah-rah tale of American triumph.
Bigelow presents this story as a decade-long intelligence procedural, mainly told from the viewpoint of dogged CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain). Her quixotic search for al-Qaeda courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti eventually leads to bin Laden, but along the way it suffers countless setbacks due to institutional inertia and ordinary bad luck. While Bigelow's The Hurt Locker was at bottom a work of psychological portraiture, Zero Dark Thirty is determinedly aloof, absorbed not with character but with narrative crannies and War on Terror minutiae. This approach is engaging and often electrifying in the moment, but Bigelow is careful to maintain an overarching mood of weariness and austerity. Ultimately, the film's boldest intimation is that the only prize for being right is as banal as a bloody corpse.
