Zero Dark Thirty is funny. Not for its recreation of violent, recent history, or even its few moments of levity deep into a punishing, nearly three-hour runtime. It’s funny the way its characters sneak sound-bites into their dialogue as cues for the audience. “There was a lot of noise after 9/11,” an analyst says. Another mentions confirmation bias. And of course, there’s “I’m gonna break you,” as featured in the trailer. Cutting through the technical jargon, it’s lines like these that attempt to shape audience perception, as if anticipating the storm of controversy generated by the film's release.

While celebrated, Zero Dark Thirty managed to upset just about everyone, from the generally left-bent think tank of film criticism to Republican politicians calling for investigations into its production. Chiefly, it was the depiction of torture that polarized audiences, with one side claiming it was propagandistic and the other side reeling at the unflattering portrayal. This question, which assumes the filmmakers’ motives and politics, may be the film’s legacy: pro-torture or anti-torture? There was a lot of noise after the release of Zero Dark Thirty, a lot of confirmation bias. However, the filmmakers weren’t trying to resolve a debate, they were trying to tell a story about the people at the heart of it. And to generate empathy for those who committed great violence and suffered untold loss, they had to break you.

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A linear document of events from 9/11 to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, the front half of the film is weighted by the torture scenes, interspersed by humdrum procedure and jump-scare terrorist attacks. These sequences marry the journalistic approach of screenwriter Mark Boal to the characteristic camera of director Kathryn Bigelow, whose style lent Point Break and Strange Days their intensity. The violence is harsh, but balanced, not sensationalized. The audience comes face-to-face with a bruised and bloody prisoner while CIA agent Dan (Jason Clarke) is cloaked in shadow. The depictions of terrorist attacks never linger on the victims. It’s objective brutality, with barely an anchoring perspective, and it’s thuddingly repetitive. Torture, terrorism, procedure, torture. In between, the arguable anchor Maya (Jessica Chastain) wipes her bleary eyes, another late night at the office. More than any anger of grief, she’s feeling the kind of exhaustion shared by the audience.

Dread Is a Dizzying Constant in 'Zero Dark Thirty'

Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty
Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Despite being the lead character, Maya is a witness. Her actions pushing the plot forward are purposely scrambled. She ends up in Poland to run an interrogation but without any on-ramp of exposition. “What’s she doing here?” and more importantly, “Why?” are only answered in the following debrief with her boss (Kyle Chandler). Her perspective is not necessarily the audience’s, but the film is never distant. Almost every moment is infused with Bigelow’s trademark suspense, regardless of who’s on screen. In one sequence, a suspected al-Qaeda member is arrested, and it plays like a horror movie. Whose dread is this? It’s simply the emotions that people in this space at the time were feeling; it’s honest. President Obama publicly denounces torture on TV, and the scene cuts to Maya's disappointed reaction. Honesty again, but not necessarily an endorsement.

The detainee program is shut down as America attempts to distance itself from torture, prompting a CIA supervisor (Mark Strong) to snap, “Who the hell am I supposed to [talk to]?” which should ring ironic to any proponents of community policing. This loss is mourned, but the agents prove capable of adapting. Dan, who washed out of the program earlier, takes a Kuwaiti businessman to a nightclub and then to a Lamborghini dealership. He has him decide on a car and only then asks for a critical piece of intel. It’s clever and charming and far easier on the eyes than waterboarding. In the next scene, Maya tries a smaller version of this tactic, approaching a CIA operative (Édgar Ramírez) as a friend, not as his boss, to extract a favor. These people are not good or bad, they’re professionals. And yet, as that becomes clear, so, too, does the cost of being a professional, being the person who fits in this world.

Maya assumed Dan’s place as head of the detainee program and became him. The position determines character, not the other way around. Late in the film, Maya is approached by a fresh-faced female analyst – a younger version of herself – to mark this transformation. While Chastain’s performance begins stiff and robotic, by the third act, she's showing flashes of humanity. Outbursts of anger, quirky arrogance, even one-liners: "I'm the motherfucker who found this place, sir." However, the film is starting to ask if any of this actually constitutes a life. The only coworker she might call a friend asks if she has any friends a couple of scenes before being killed in a bombing. When the CIA director (James Gandolfini) asks Maya, “What else have you done for us, besides bin Laden?” and she answers, "Nothing. I’ve done nothing else," he’s at a loss for words. Like water, Maya has filled a role in an institution, one that the bureaucracy itself doesn’t fully understand or sanction. So close to bin Laden, however, the audience knows she’s necessary.

Maya finally locates the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and smiles for the first time in the film while listening to a conversation by SEAL Team Six. They’re assembled for the coming raid, but casual at the moment, even jovial, throwing horseshoes. Maya receives a phone call: the raid is tonight, and she glances once again at these men. More lives she’s about to lose. The famed special operators take two helicopters in, and while Chris Pratt’s Navy SEAL provides a snippet of comedy, there’s no Little Richard on the stereo. In fact, the score is low-key where it should be triumphant. The team touches down for a bravura sequence of suspense, racked with tension and flashes of horrific violence. No score whatsoever here, only gunfire, women’s screams, and children crying. There’s a shot from the children’s perspective of their dead father in the next room. Journalism and documentary filmmaking require an objective lens, but both become humanistic the closer they’re drawn to the subject.

'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Focused, Not Didactic

Jessica Chastain as Maya working in front of a computer in Zero Dark Thirty
Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

When audience signposts like score and a subjective camera are excised from film language, it’s extraordinary how effective movies can be. The audience isn’t being told what to feel, so when a soldier slips and falls on a roof during exfil, it’s felt – free of any political context. Maybe he’s a hero, maybe he just participated in an illegal mission. In that moment, he’s a soldier who fell down. Just the same, Maya identifies the body of Osama bin Laden, and this leads to the film’s coda. She finds herself alone, after accomplishing the only goal of her 12-year career, and she begins to cry. Maya has witnessed things, done things, lost people. Was it worth it? In that moment, for her, the answer was no.

After a harrowing opening scene, with dispatch recordings of people inside the World Trade Center as the attack was happening, Zero Dark Thirty pulls the audience two years ahead, to when Dan is barking orders at a prisoner of war. “If you don’t look at me when I talk to you, I hurt you. You step off this mat, I hurt you.” Two years, and there are already rules in place. A culture. However, all the genre hallmarks of terrorism and counterterrorism – bomb vests, situation rooms, holy places, AK-47s – they’ve been built over what is, truthfully, senseless violence like a well-worn Band-Aid. We can play the game, but this is loss so profound it’s impossible to restore, violence so terrible there can be no justice. It’s heartening that the earliest and as yet definitive pop culture document on the assassination of Osama bin Laden is ambivalent about it, to be generous. Instead of rendering judgment or taking a side, the filmmakers were far more interested in the noble but quixotic search for humanity in a world where it simply didn't exist.