Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jason Clark and Jessica Chastain, is about the ten year long hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his death at the hands of Seal Team 6.
Jason Clark, who plays Dan, is most known for his roles in Lawless, Public Enemies, and Death Race. Dan’s job is to torture Iraqi detainees for information on Bin Laden and 9/11. He did an eerily good job of going from a nice, cool, charming guy to a stone-faced torturer. It was actually quite disturbing seeing him talk to his friends and then walk into the room with the detainee and become a cold-blooded torturer with no heart.
Jessica Chastain (The Help, Lawless, and Mama) plays Maya, the woman who discovered where Bin Laden was hiding by using the very few resources at her disposal. Chastain did a great job of showing the growing desperation in the hunt for Bin Laden. She increasingly became more cold to the world while at the same time being subject to fits of nervous breakdown.
The movie is open to a lot of controversy. It’s the first movie that shows the horrible things that we did to attain the information on Bin Laden’s whereabouts. It went into gross detail of how the detainees were treated and tortured and was brutally honest about the hells that they went through.
Zero Dark Thirty was fantastic. What made the movie great was how brutally honest it was in showing what we did as a country to bring down our greatest nemesis. It is up to the viewer to decide if our means to the end was really worth it.
