Kathryn Bigelow’s exclusion is the one so-called snub that many people consider possibly larger than the Affleck oversight, although Bigelow doesn’t have a Golden Globe trophy for her work this year. But come on. Zero Dark Thirty is a work of utter brilliance. There’s a reason more critics have placed it at the top of their year-end lists than for any other film. It’s both a force of tense action and a subtle analysis of an incredible protagonist—forceful in its momentum of information gathering through a variety of means, some ingenious and some horrendous, toward a beautifully executed climactic sequence at the Bin Laden compound; and subtle in its depiction of Maya, the CIA agent brought to life by Jessica Chastain, whose obsession and determination to locate the man responsible for unspeakable tragedy transcends her own moral compass and any interest in human relationship or office and gender politics.
In a way, this film has everything Argo has but operates in this higher dimension, presenting the beautiful and the despicable at the same time, detailing the complexities and compromises that made up the story of this intricate manhunt. It sews together hard research into this true story with drama and suspense captured and replayed before our eyes, giving us the feeling that even though we know it didn’t actually happen in this exact way, perhaps it could have. The realism and depth of analysis, and the subtlety with which this is done, is a testament to the outstanding work of screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow.
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