Oh My Word, this is a terrible film. They never even tell you why it's called Zero Dark Thirty, but having survived two and half hours of this rubbish the only thing imperative to know is where the exit or off button is.
It's difficult to know where to start. All I can do is state here at the beginning that you should save your money, and your time, and spend the two and half hours you would otherwise evaporate by watching this film on something useful.
From the start the piece is conceited and trivialises very serious issues in a way that suggests the film makers assumed the IQ of their audience would be very low. Perhaps this is also the reason it contains every cliche that seems to afflict any film of this 'genre'.
Cliches abound. You've got conversations that are so serious that all the interlocutors walk in formation facing apart from one another whilst striding down serious corridors. They use foul language constantly, presumably because it shows they're 'real'. You've got a protagonist who apparently is intellectually gifted, which supposedly is evident from moments like putting food in her mouth before starting a conversation and speaking around the cud, again whilst not actually looking at the person she's apparently having a conversation with. It also seems to be obligatory to have staff speaking to one another or being spoken to like rubbish when having high powered conversations. It's despair inducing that it's assumed that actual work gets done whilst behaving like this. Worse still people watching conceited films like this, might go onto behave like this in the real world, allowing it to inform their behaviour even though they may think their assumptions on how to behave professionally are entirely their own. It's also a worry that as a 'cultural export' there will be people watching this film around the world getting the impression that to any extent people in the West share the moral poverty of these characters. Naturally that's a totally separate issue, but who's going to tell them that?
Bigalow must take responsibility for the short comings of her film. This appears to have been a 'worthy' project. After the Hurt Locker she seems to have been deemed persona grata and given cooperation to make this puerile film. Don't get me wrong. I say here that if I was to make a film I'm sure it would be unwatchable, but that's why I'm not involved in film making.
I may have missed even more points I could have included here, but I could only bear to watch the film once. Even the lead actress appears to recognise she's lent herself to an awful production, in her last scene where the character indulges in an advanced blubbing masterclass, presumably she's partly grief stricken at the death of what should have been a promising career.
Perhaps I've been a little harsh, but where should the buck stop with something as execrable this?
Jennifer Ehle deserves praise though. It was only when the credits ran that I recognised it was her. Now that's what can be called a class act.