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But after a succession of road blocks, setbacks and dead ends, Maya finally convinces herself that bin Laden is holed up in the house in Abbottabad, whereupon her convictions ascend the ladder of command to the point where the CIA director (James Gandolfini) braces himself to enter the Oval Office and recommend a stealth raid to the president.īigelow and Boal play a long game, moving from the brutal opening through impressively detailed but not always compelling vignettes of the CIA at work to interludes in which Maya’s ferocious dedication begins to possibly pay dividends and finally to the climactic 40 minutes, which lay out with extraordinary detail and precision the almost improbably successful operation that begins at Area 51 in Nevada, where we first see the amazing stealth helicopters ideally designed for such a mission, and ends with Maya identifying the body that’s brought back. Even once she and her cohorts track down the long-elusive Abu Ahmad, following his vehicle through the chaotic streets of Rawalpindi is a nightmare.
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From very early on, Maya seizes on the idea that the way to eventually track down bin Laden is to identify and follow his couriers, as they will inevitably one day reveal where the Al-Qaeda leader is hiding.Īs we know, she’s right, but it takes years for the tactic to pay off. The director also successfully creates a double-clad environment that is both eerie and threatening, that of the supposedly safe and protected enclaves of the CIA that exist within the larger context of the Muslim world.
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Much as she did with the equally tightly wound protagonist of The Hurt Locker, Bigelow sends Maya through a minefield, this time consisting of bureaucratic trip-wires as well as potentially fatal traps. She becomes tolerably friendly with a gregarious, chatty female colleague (the ever-wonderful Jennifer Ehle) but most of the time is the only female in the room she knows when to hold her tongue, and her frustrations are legion, but she also finds her moments to assert herself and speak out to superiors when she suspects her contributions are being ignored, due either to her rank or because she’s a woman. Given no backstory, links to the world outside the CIA or any interest in small talk or other subjects, Maya occasionally has a drink to unwind but otherwise seems entirely incapable of shutting down her laser-like focus of her obsession.
#Actors in the movie zero dark thirty series
The man who had engineered the deaths of some 4,000 people became a phantom, protected by forbidding geography, loyal followers and an already legendary aura.įor a while, as the film hopscotches through the years, Boal’s script appears to be structured journalistically around a series of greatest terrorist hits, so to speak: We witness the deadly outrages of a 2004 attack in Saudi Arabia, the 2005 bus and tube bombing in London, the 2008 attack on the Karachi Marriott and, the following year, a shocking breach at a secured CIA base in Afghanistan.Ĭonnecting the dots, however, is the dogged presence of Maya ( Jessica Chastain), a young, flame-haired CIA officer who barely flinches when she first witnesses torture, is described as “a killer” by a colleague and, after a close call, allows that, “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.” Boal, who dug as deeply into the classified aspects of the case as possible but seems to have been more committed to protecting the identities of those involved than even some participants have been, has said that there really is a “Maya,” though details have been fudged and altered to prevent identification. Then again, the hunt for bin Laden was no picnic either it was an enormously frustrating endeavor that untold amounts of money, manpower and strategic thinking couldn’t bring to a successful close for nearly a decade.