Several years ago, my two favorite films of the year were Bright Star and The Hurt Locker.  I share this to convey that I have been deeply moved by the work of Kathryn Bigelow (director) and Mark Boal (writer) in the past.

While I found Zero Dark Thirty well-made and thought-provoking, there was an emotional engagement that I expected and wished for but did not find in this film.  I am not sure that is so much a criticism as an observation.  There is a place for films that feel a bit like a procedural, a (manufactured and compressed) tick tock (in the political sense) of the race to capture Osama bin Laden (funny, isn’t it, how his name has become less fearsome since his death).

I like the performances.  I like the cinematography and editing.  I like other aesthetic elements.  I like the script and understand the economy of focusing on one character, Maya (Jessica Chastain), whom Bigelow may identify with as she is a woman in the man’s world of Hollywood.  The storyline of Zero Dark Thirty suggests worlds of organizational conflict with personal implications peeking up at the surface of the narrative.

I think I needed more than a peek to feel more emotional engagement with the film.

The sequence in The Hurt Locker that makes it a great film for me is when Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a member of an Army bomb squad at war in Iraq, goes home.  Everything changes.  During this relatively brief interlude, the film has a blue tone to it literally and figuratively (in contrast to the hot colors of the desert), and viewers see how James has been so damaged by the war – and become so addicted to the adrenalin rush of seeking and detonating bombs – that he can longer connect with his wife and child and the life he left behind.  Wow.  This helps me know the man beyond what he does and gives me a sense of who he is and who he used to be.

There are glimpses into what makes Maya tick, sort of, but not enough for me to experience her as a real person. 

Inevitably, because of the CIA presence and the woman as a lone wolf smarter than the rest of the pack elements, people like to compare Zero Dark Thirty to the Showtime hit Homeland.  Clearly, there are opportunities in episodic television to draw complex characters like Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and give viewers enormous insight into how she thinks and why, but Bigelow has proven before that she can accomplish that with amazing skill and great economy, so the lack of insight into Maya’s character is a choice unrelated to format.

By all means see Zero Dark Thirty, which is an accomplished film, but don’t think you are alone if you see Maya as a bit of a cipher.  If this agent has developed a certain opacity to cope with past trauma and organizational sexism, it would be helpful to see a bit more of the context for this in the movie.

Oh, a word about torture.  I will leave the discussion about whether or not torture yields useful information to experts, but the discussion about the sequences in this film as exceptional because of the graphic nature of the content strike me as somewhat uninformed or willfully ignorant.  Just this past week on two network television series — Scandal and The Office — there were waterboarding instances included in the plot.  Yes, one was a joke, but the other was included in a horrific episode of torture inflicted upon an innocent man in the Pentagon.