Zero Dark Thirty just might have us cheering for our neighbours again
Even though The Hurt Locker gave me one of the worst most excruciatingly painful fucking migraines I’ve ever had (“Hey! Let’s shake the camera wildly around; it’ll give the audience wicked nausea and they’ll feel like they’re really part of the action!”) I’m willing to concede its greatness. This is only because director Kathryn Bigelow rules and she won an Oscar. (After being snubbed for Point Break .)
Her latest Zero Dark Thirty looks totally badass like a condensed tome on CIA intrigue crossed with a psychological thriller. (It’s what Cannon Pictures used to do with Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone only longer more arty and serious.) Most of the press surrounding Bigelow is shallow commentary on her gender particularly since her Oscar win: her past dalliances with James Cameron; recent incredibly stupid sexist remarks by Bret Easton Ellis who claims that her critical acclaim is solely due to her hotness. (Comments he unsuccessfully tried to weasel out of after the fact. If you were unsure whether American Psycho — hell any Ellis novel — is satirical or just revolting and sexist there’s your proof. What an idiot. Okay Glamorama is pretty great.)
It’s unfortunate as she’s been turning out great work since the beginning of her career. Near Dark is one of the most idiosyncratic vampire movies ever made a grim westernroad movie hybrid featuring a truly unhinged performance from Bill Paxton and that super weird lispy kid from The River’s Edge . Though Blue Steel ’s thriller plot was paint-by-numbers it had Jamie Lee Curtis looking hot in a cop uniform. (Ron Silver doesn’t count.) The little seen Strange Days deserves a wider audience with its wonderfully hyperkinetic sci-fi visuals — a precursor to her work in The Hurt Locker . Point Break is transcendentally awesome the Tao Te Ching of action movies. And I never saw K-19: The Widowmaker — it looked like dull dad movie fare; a submarine movie with Harrison Ford acting like a grumpy jerk and sporting a hilariously awful Russian accent. It still sounds like a recipe for disaster. I’m going to go buy it tomorrow.
After making The Hurt Locker it made sense that Bigelow would be tapped to make another military-styled thriller focusing on broody types with unbelievably stressful jobs. It could’ve made for a sophomore slump (of sorts) but if anyone was going to tell the story of shadowy hilariously hard-to-catch international super-villain Osama bin Laden getting his cap peeled back she’s the one to do it. The news reports detailing how Bigelow and her crew were made privy to hitherto unknown black ops shit only adds to the intrigue not to mention the commentary from the usual political blowhards who are already denouncing the film sight unseen. (It’s pro-torture! No it’s anti-torture!)
The kinda super secret story of how a gang of soldiers and intelligence agents (led by the elfish Jessica Chastain in extra moody mode) located and killed bin Laden is sure to be dark violent and make everyone like America again for a couple of hours. And not in a backhanded way either — early reviews all agree on how balanced and unflinching Bigelow is in dealing with the years-long mostly futile search for the world’s biggest bad guy. Supposedly she doesn’t offer up any easy answers. For years the U.S.’s reputation wasn’t worth much and taking down bin Laden was a bittersweet addendum to its thuggish tactics. After countless books bodies and bullets the whole thing seemed anticlimactic; now bin Laden’s even more mythic than he was before the war. Leave it to Hollywood to try and close the chapter on this one.
