Zero Dark Thirty

"The ultra-professional result may be easier to respect than enjoy," said Peter Debruge in his review for “Variety” and I couldn’t agree more. The process that lead to the discovery of the hideout of Osama bin Laden and his killing is very well portrayed, with Jessica Chastain as a “tough” agent, cold and emotionless. It must have been the only way to film this story so shortly after the events, without turning it into dumb propaganda or, on the contrary, a silly anti-American conspiracy. Thumbs up, for sure, but did I enjoy it? No. It’s still a three-hour long borefest in the desert rather than a gripping war movie. (06/01/2013)

The losers have a voice and dignity (which we realize when they are completely denied and the film does not turn “eyes"), the winners are not here - only strange marked beings without intimacy and pleasure, lonely technocrats who approve to any sort of crap, but it breaks them down when someone shoots their favorite monkeys. One of the American critics wrote that this procedural view of "the administration of justice" is amoral and came, like Greengrass' Flight 93, too soon. I say: just in time. Maybe one day we will see a film where everything will be given with clear moral values, the good will be good and the bad will be bad. This will be the story of the winners. Zero Dark Thirty is a story of lost and abandoned people, which can be interpreted as admiration for the performance of the bureaucratic machinery of the secret services, but rather offers the interpretation that Bigelow has made another bold film about stigmatized individuals who "move history". (14/02/2013)

I understand that getting Osama was mostly due to lengthy bureaucracy combined with refreshing waterboarding, but the first hour of this film is the pure essence of boredom. It only begins to pick up after the attack on the base in Afghanistan, only to culminate in the final bit of action, which is something so precisely and coldly filmed that the director's craft is bewildering; anyway, we won't know for a few years whether this film came too soon or too late. 3 ½. (22/01/2013)

In the same spirit as The Hurt Locker. When possible, it is impersonal, cold, and always absolutely precise; while in crucial moments it is deadly to the point that my teeth almost chatter. I wanted to deliberately undermine Kathryn Bigelow in my review for the fact that, with its running time, documentary storytelling style, and barely glimpsed characters, it remains constantly unappealing to the average viewer. But it simply can't be done. Faced with the perfect Mark Strong and a six-star finale, there is nothing left but to salute the quiet and unnoticed ZD30. (24/02/2013)

The perspective of one of the workaholic cogs in an overseas bureaucratic machine for the search for a "symbol of all evil" - a.k.a., a procedural drama in the purest possible form. As interesting and detailed as it is, it's also cold, audience-unfriendly, and requires more than a cursory knowledge of the events. The first, office hour is significantly better than the second, which for logical reasons was fundamentally reworked from the original concept. There is no propaganda, and the Allies come out no better than "the bad guys," but nevertheless if a (much) longer time had elapsed since these events, it would have been better. (11/01/2013)