Film reenacting hunt for Osama bin Laden delivers realism unlike any action movie before.

OUR GRADE: 5 stars

YOUR GRADE: 

“Zero Dark Thirty” is not your average action movie. There is no romance, little humor and the few chase scenes are nowhere near as high-octane as we’ve come to expect. In fact, the film seems less like an action movie and more like a well-researched documentary —  meticulous, gripping, surprising.

No, “Zero Dark Thirty” is not your average action movie. It’s far better.

Reuniting director Kathryn Bigelow and journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, the creative forces behind 2009’s war film “The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty” chronicles the 10-year-long hunt for Osama bin Laden without romanticizing or glorifying the subject matter. The plot is decidedly unglamorous: a young CIA operative named Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, is shipped out to the Middle East to interrogate detainees affiliated with Al Qaeda.

It’s a thankless task with little reward, and, as we all know, it takes ten years for the benefits to surface (the film is decidedly more realistic than an episode of “24.”) This realism results in a masterpiece that, though not always easy to stomach, remains truthful and consistently enthralls.

Before the film even starts, we’re informed that everything we’re about to see has been reconstructed from eyewitness accounts. The message to the viewer is that this isn’t any old action movie — this is the truth (although that point has been contested by some). We’re shown real footage of the 2005 London bombings and of President Obama discussing counterterrorism efforts. We’re also shown scenes that depict torture and death unflinchingly; even controversial practices like waterboarding are not off-limits. This is not the kind of film in which explosions and gunfights are treated flippantly.

Of course, all the efforts to give “Zero Dark Thirty” an air of truth would fail without the support of an excellent cast. Luckily, the actors and actresses assembled for the film are nothing short of brilliant.

Chastain, whose character is based on a real woman known only as “Jen,” is a force of nature. Chastain plays Maya as though she was born to, channeling willpower, vulnerability and a healthy measure of brashness (When her presence is questioned at a male-dominated CIA meeting focused on capturing bin Laden, Maya snaps, “I’m the motherf—er that found him.”)

Similarly delightful is Jason Clarke, who plays Maya’s co-worker and mentor Dan. He appears first as a somewhat deranged torture machine, but Clarke’s nuanced portrayal doesn’t allow that to be the case for long. As Dan’s humanity reveals itself so does our understanding of the film’s essential moral ambiguity. Bigelow isn’t here to pick sides or to tell us what’s right: her goal is to provide us with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The real force behind “Zero Dark Thirty” is Bigelow’s dedication to creating a film that is not intended to exploit the events of the last 10 years, but rather to shed light upon them. It’s what makes the eventual and inevitable death of bin Laden feel less like a glorious victory and more like a flat conclusion to an exhausted saga; and it’s also what ensures that “Zero Dark Thirty,” much like the manhunt that inspired it, will not soon be forgotten.