Zero Dark thirty:

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, and Édgar Ramírez.

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Synopsis: Jessica Chastain stars as Maya, A CIA officer that has devoted her entire career to finding the notorious Osama Bin Laden. She was assigned to the US Embassy in Pakistan to work with another CIA officer, Dan (Jason Clarke). Maya, Dan, and the rest of their colleagues team up for years to discover the location of Bin Laden, where he is ultimately neutralized.

Review:

So let’s start with the positives. The acting in this film was great. The viewer could identify with all of the characters and their emotions. Jessica Chastain won a Golden Globe for Best Actress-Drama. The main characters had the right amount of grit and seriousness that a drama needs. They could even snatch a chuckle out of you every once in a while.

Unfortunately, this is not enough to make someone enjoy a movie. For starters, with a runtime of 160 minutes, it makes you feel like you are watching an entire drawn out series on Netflix. What is that 2 and 2/3 of an hour filled with? Boringness: even with a plot of such potential Bigelow managed to bore me.

Immediately after the movie was over, I left thinking, “That was awesome.” But the longer you let the movie simmer the more you realize you are reminiscing about 50 minutes of the mammoth-length movie.

The movie also made it seem like the interrogators were inhumane because they did what they had to do to save thousands of lives. We understand the point they are trying to make but you can’t just give a devout terrorist some candy and expect the answers to ooze out. Even the end of the movie, (which is already mildly disappointing because we know the end result), was a big let-down. It showed SEALS scaring the bajeezus out of people and killing Bin Laden. Not even in a way that made you thrust your fist in the air as you left the theater exclaiming, “’Merica!” It was more like, “Well, we did it.”

The movie almost made me feel guilty at some points, even though what was done had to be done to bring down Osama Bin Laden.

While the acting was great, I was bored for far too much of those 160 minutes. The interrogation scenes made the US seem harsh, and maybe out of line.  It just didn’t play viewers emotions as it should have in my opinion. I think it could have been a great movie had it been about 100 minutes and had a more fulfilling resolution.