Zero Dark Thirty

In Kathryn Bieglow’s Zero Dark Thirty, war is portrayed in a much different fashion than the other stories that we have covered. The other stories we have looked at focused mainly on the actual combat. Zero Dark Thirty, however, is set behind the scenes. Instead of the battlefield, the film is set mainly in offices. It follows Maya, a young CIA operative, throughout her decade long manhunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. The film focuses on peeling back the layers of mystery surrounding Bin Laden until he is finally located and killed. It shows the technical aspect of war – the planning, the guesswork, and the sleuthing needed to take down the most important figures. Every move that the characters make is calculated and planned to extract information, conceal their movements, and inch that much closer to finding Bin Laden. The decade of hunting is punctuated by Al Qaeda-orchestrated terrorist attacks, including some that kill a few of Maya’s friends. This sets the tone of desperation surrounding the mission. The longer Bin Laden goes unfound, the more terrorist attacks he is able to orchestrate. The conflict here is not between two armies, but between the CIA, Bin Laden, and the clock. Bin Laden is shown to have taken very serious and ingenious methods towards concealing his location. This only makes unraveling the mystery that much harder for the CIA. War is portrayed not as brazen conflict, but rather a complex, tense operation of investigation. Part of this investigation includes interrogation, including torturing detainees for information regarding Bin Laden. These methods are banned midway through the search, which forces the CIA to utilize different methods for hunting down Bin Laden, further complicating the mission. War is portrayed almost like a complicated surgery, with Bin Laden as the hidden tumor that is causing all the problems.