Zero Dark Thirty | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Did the director, Kathryn Bigelow and writer, Mark Boal, intend this film as an indictment of an intellectually flaccid president and his pathetic administration? In a word: No. But then again, Director Bigelow and Writer Boal did not need to intend any message, other than the aforementioned obvious, to project that certain knowledge. All they did was tell a dramatic story of misbegotten society, many of which are our enemies, as truthfully as was their charge to do so.

    For me, I found that truth refreshingly honest. As dispiriting as enhanced interrogation (i.e. waterboarding) is for good people to observe as portrayed in "Zero", Director Bigelow subtlely successfully made that argument because it did work. Sadly, its the world we live in, and the argument was advanced that under the Obama Administration the War on Terror was being prosecuted "with one arm tied behind their backs."

Jessica Chastain as the persistent Maya studied intently, for many years, the many threads of information to discover the whereabouts of the world's most successful terrorist: Above. Kyle Chandler, as Pakistan CIA Bureau Chief Joseph Bradley, emphatically discusses the matter, getting bin Laden, with Maya: Below.

    But this whole Candidate Obama apologist approach to fighting the Global War on Terror came later in the film. In the beginning, just a short time after nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans were murdered on our soil, Americans used enhanced interrogation techniques and thus began the unraveling of Al-Qaeda. To that end, and with much conviction of purpose, we meet the story's heroine, Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, who possessed the dogged determination to find the evil bin Laden. For her fine portrayal of the CIA field operative who scoured the earth for the world's most wanted man, she was nominated for the Oscar for Beast Actor in a Female Lead.

    Maya, Chastain, began her quest for that perfect retribution, for the 9/11 massacre of the innocents, by beginning her CIA career at the Pakistan bureau, and, on occasion, at a "dark site," where enhanced interrogation was performed on detainees. The visage of grown men being treated, well, rather disrespectfully was difficult at first for the fresh CIA field agent; but, once she discovered that interjecting mind games into the detainees daily regimen of water-boarding and other various sundry physical activities could be effective for the most reluctant subjects, she was fully on board with the controversial process.

    Maya not only did not shrink away from enhanced interrogation, she reveled in her ability to extract information, re-assimilate it into other possible threads of projected possibilities of workable intelligence, and work these multiple platforms to derive better threads of intel, until that day, she, and all her fellow dedicated CIA agents, found their man ... well ... kind of.

Maya contemplates bin Laden's Abbottabad compound, and how she could convince the powers to be to "live a little" and kill bin Laden: Above. Patrick, Joel Edgerton, contemplates whether he can trust Maya with the lives of his team of super soldiers: Below.

    Consequently, Maya, by virtue of these many nebulous threads that were developed into a cohesive story, discovered where the compound where Osama bin Laden was probably housed in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

    Probably housed?

    There was no way to know for sure as Osama did not take exercise outside, but rather, as per his computers' hard drive's history, the maniacal Muslim developed an obvious passion for searching porn. As everyone, not living under a rock, knows, Osama's steady ocular diet of porn came to a crashing end when Seal Team 6 put him down like a rabid dog on May 11, 2011.

At the compound, Seal Team 6 gathers at different points, prepared to do their worse: Above and below.    Click the picture to expand to as much as 1000 pixels wide within most expanded images, and then push the arrows embedded in the center edge of the play-box to access the gallery, and slide new images into viewing within the center of the screen.

    Now, the discovering of the house, which hastened the demise of the world's most wanted murderer, may be a fitting end to this powerful story of one woman's persistence; however, Maya's proclivity to persistence was necessary to this tale's dynamic end. Without that enduring nature, there might have never been one dead bin Laden, and her devotion to that fitting end was a good bit of that story. Without intel delivering Osama in a "perfectly tied bow," "Zero Dark Thirty" tells us that the "brass" at the CIA were too fearful of an Obama Administration that was very hesitant, and indecisive, in their commitment to hastening the demise of the world's most murderous terrorist.