3) Zero Dark Thirty
There are actually a number of moments in Zero Dark Thirty where I suddenly realized it wasn’t the movie I thought it was going to be, and they were all, upon reflection, brilliant choices made by writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow. The first moment that makes you sit up in your seat comes in the black screen opening, where we’re sitting in a pitch dark theater just listening to horrific sounds of 9/11. This is something of a stage-setter, an immediate attention grabber and heart stopper, but the scene that made me realize what kind of movie this was came in its second act, when Mark Strong makes an appearance that shakes up the CIA staff he’s addressing as well as the audience watching them get ripped apart for their failures.
You can talk at length about the way this scene reinforces the stakes for these analysts in their intelligence battles against al Qaeda, or the way it reiterates the context of all the actions Maya and her superiors have undertaken to this point. These are important features of the scene, reasons it’s so important in terms of the movie’s plot. The sheer crafting and staging of the scene stand out for me most of all. Mark Strong’s impassioned monologue is of course a powerfully delivered speech on its own. It not only conveys the urgency of their quest but expresses the frustration that comes with the challenges of fighting (and at this point in their minds, losing to) an enemy they still don’t fully understand.
The single greatest detail in this scene, for me at least, is that every single person in the room is staring at the table while they’re being violently verbally chastised by their supervisor—everyone except for Maya. She turns and looks him in the eye. Because in addition to being the smartest person in the room, she’s also the toughest. From this point on, the hunt is intensified, and if we were able to take our eyes off the film before, we definitely can’t anymore.
