Zero Dark Thirty manages to enthrall my boredom like no other!!

Greetings, reader!!

Have you pondered many a sleepless night away with questions about America's hunt for Osama Bin Laden? Have you always wanted to learn more about the men and women who devoted themselves to finding Bin Laden and bringing him to justice? Would you like nothing more than to watch these men and women spend countless hours staring blankly at computer screens, scanning hostage torture footage, and endless conversations in which the people being interrogated send their questioners on wild goose chases by providing them with minimal information regarding Bin Laden's whereabouts? If these are the things that strike your fancy, then the first two hours of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty will feel heaven sent. If, however, you are more inclined to desire anything remotely captivating in your filmgoing experiences, say a storyline worth following or even characters you can connect to, you may want to keep looking. Bigelow's follow up to her Oscar winning The Hurt Locker is a dreadful bore, an exercise in tedium unfolding at a glacial pace that makes 2001: A Space Odyssey look like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Quite frankly, I'm a bit astonished at the near universal acclaim Zero Dark Thirty has been receiving. I don't think I've ever been so bored in a movie theater this year and I've seen The Hobbit. Sure, Bigelow's direction is solid enough. The film is shot with a 'fly on the wall' urgency that desperately attempts to distract us from the glaring fact that not much is happening in the first couple hours of its two and a half hour running length. There's practically nothing to connect to during this time. The plot and situations are a cyclical series of events that are sluggish beyond all belief. Nearly every scene features someone sitting in an office, walking down a hallway, or an interrogation which recycles the same exchanges over and over. They look a little something like this:

Interrogator: "Where is Osama Bin Laden?"

Terrorist: "You will never find him."

Interrogator: "Oh yeah?" *TORTURE* "How 'bout now?"

Terrorist: "Okay, okay, I'll tell you the truth. I don't know where he is, but 'so-and-so' might."

Interrogator: "Thanks, bro."

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

And speaking of torture, I'm not sure why this film is garnering up so much controversy about its supposed 'explicit' torture scenes. It's disturbing, yes, but pretty tame in terms of its graphicness. Even Casino Royale had a torture scene more painful to watch than the ones on display here. Come to think of it, the only torturous thing about Zero Dark Thirty is its running length.

Between brief moments in which I desperately tried to fall asleep, I managed to take notice of the decent, but overall unimpressive performance of Jessica Chastain as Maya, the agent in charge of tracking Bin Laden down. Now, make no mistake, Chastain has oodles of talent; anyone who's seen her in Tree of Life or Take Shelter can attest to that. She's honestly one of my favorite actors working today. Her performance here, though, is mostly monotone. She gets a nice little moment in which she yells at a superior and another random outburst of emotion at the film's close, but for the remainder of the film, she spends her time staring blankly at computer screens, terrorist hostages, colleagues, and maybe a wall or two. When she's given dialogue, she recites it with all the enthusiasm of a high schooler being forced to read passages outloud in their English class. Other performances in the movie are mostly anonymous thanks to a boring beyond all reason screenplay by Mark Boal.

A couple of terrorist attacks are peppered throughout the story, probably in the hopes that the viewing audience will be jarred from their napping, but there is very little in the way of actual suspense, emotion, or thrills. That is, until the film's climax, which involves Seal Team Six's assault on the Bin Laden hideaway. This twenty to thirty minute sequence is easily the strongest of the entire movie. Bigelow shows off her knack for crafting high wire tension and one finally recalls why people consider her to be talented. Truth be told, even with the minimal screen time they received, I cared more about the soldiers involved in the attack than anyone else I'd been forced to spend time with in the preceding two hours. It's a glimpse of another better movie and it's a shame it's not the one we got to see.

FINAL RATING: 2.5/5