Zero Dark Thirty
Monday, February 18, 2013
Lives are lost every day for an incredible amount of reasons. Death can be quick and silent, or it can drag on for years and years. It can be because of old age, or sickness, accidents, or even weather. In this case, lives were lost because it was someone's job.
Imagine having a job with the sole responsibility, the sole purpose, to kill a single man. To take the life of a human being. Someone who was a father, and a husband. A person who was loved by friends and family. A soul that my Christ died for. A man, who's name is Osama Bin Laden.
It was Maya's job for an entire decade to hunt down the man responsible for killing thousands of innocent American lives on September 11, 2001. Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young and seemingly inexperienced CIA operative, is put out in the the middle of a war zone to try and connect thousands of tiny pieces of information in order to track down "one of the disappeared ones." It quickly begins to look like an impossible mission. No one is talking. No progress is made. People are still getting killed, bombs are still going off and Maya isn't any closer to finding her target.
Years go by. Friends leave and friends die. People are tortured, a new president is elected, more bombs detonate, and Maya continues. With nothing going her way, she continues to slowly take step after step towards the front door of bin Laden. Once she finally think's she's there, they finally have the option to pull the trigger.
So far he had just been a face in a photograph. The face of the enemy. Then it becomes a game of odds. With very little to work off of, they jump at the idea that they actually found their target. For an entire decade he could have been regarded as a myth with the how little factual evidence there was to prove his location/existence. Now they have a possible location. What do they do with that? What if he really is there? Has Osama bin Laden really been found? Only one way to find out. Send in the Seals.
After a spectacular suspenseful raid on the home, all of their questions and concerns are confirmed. The decade long mission, accomplished. They have killed the face of terrorism.
The man they hunted for so long, is now dead. After looking at a face for a decade only in picture form, you lose sense of the real person. Then to see that face for the first time in a body bag with blood splattered over it, and it's eyes staring up at you, what must that feel like? How can you look into a man's face that you killed? Without ever placing her hand on a gun, Maya killed him. She ended his life. That fact finally hits her in the end. This was her job. She had even stated earlier, this mission was her "reason for being on this earth." Killing him, was her reason for being here. How the heck are you supposed to cope with that?
During the raid you see children and women at bin Laden's home. Could it be possible for people to actually love this man? Could it be possible that he has a family? We see him for the first time as an ordinary man. It is so polar opposite to how we have been raised to see him. When we see his face we are supposed to feel a prick of hatred. Maya had never actually seen him until his body was lying in front of her. Her mission, her purpose for being on this earth, is now complete. What does she do? She cries. She does not cry out of happiness or exhaustion, but what I believe to be as grief. For ten years her only focus was this mission. A mission to kill this man.
Kathryn Bigelow directs a very talented cast that delivers again and again by tackling a deeper issue than just killing a target. The story presented here doesn't get distracted by the hunt itself, but stays true to how Maya's character evolves through the hunt. Killing seems so easy when it's just a target and you're far away pushing a button, but to look in the eye of someone you just killed takes courage I do not have. They didn't make this movie just to cheer for Americans and brag about how they killed the "bad guy," but instead to show us what our thirst for revenge looks like.
We celebrated the death of this man as a country, and the one person who organized, directed, and lead the team that actually shot him in the forehead, cries. What does that say about us?
As I was leaving the theater, I could only think of saying thank you to Kathryn Bigelow and her incredible team for holding up the mirror to me and asking me, "why did you want to watch this movie?"
