Zero Dark Thirty–Creative Writing–Movie Review

Zero Dark Thirty Reveals Flavor of the Truth We Will Never Fully Know

If you’ve not seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty about the decade-long search for Osama Bid Laden I recommend you see it at least once. Unlike The Hobbit or Argo, I’m not sure I’ll be going back again. Though the movies rising star and now Golden Globe winner, Jessica Chastain, could tempt me, it’s just not a movie I will find myself wanting to see time and time again.

Jessica Chastain playing “Maya” in Zero Dark Thirty

And here’s why; it reminds me too much of the stress I’ve felt ever since seeing the second plane fly into the second tower in New York on 9/11. That was a horrific day and one I shall not forget and watching a movie about going after the guy who allegedly caused it all, while satisfactory in the outcome, just stirs cracks in the wounds I hope that some day will be more healed than they are now, even after 11 years.

Revenge and justice are good things. Well, as Christians we’d argue the first emotion isn’t such a good thing. Yes, I’m glad we just shot OBL dead instead of letting him live and go through a trial somewhere to give him additional time to stir his troops and generate tremendous additional costs of man power, lives and wasted oxygen on him.

But as fictional character Maya gets on the plane at the end and starts crying, I have to wonder why she’s crying. Because the saga is over and she’s worked so hard to make it happen, or for those who have lost their lives, or because even after traversing the world and chasing after this scumb bag all these years, killing his ass really didn’t bring about the satisfaction she’d hoped for.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we got OBL and the world clearly is a safer place with him dead. But the point of all this is, after seeing a long movie about the process, largely fictional and factual, how much we never will really know, I’m just not in a hurry to go to a theater and sit through it again. If you had to go through the past decade again every day with the knowledge that OBL was still on the loose, would you want to do that?

There also is the wide discussion among the libs that there’s an inference in the movie that waterboarding/torture works and that that led to finding OBL. How politically incorrect that’s seemed to the left.

And I couldn’t help but having the feeling of what seeing a movie like this is going to do in the minds of OBL followers. Will it enrage them and encourage them to produce new attacks on American soil, American theaters and moviegoers?

And then I have to wonder how much of what was portrayed in the movie was real and what was invented by Hollywood. In that, Zero Dark Thirty reveals a flavor of the truth that ultimately we will never fully know.

Yes, I do encourage you to go see the movie. It is good cinema. Yes, I’m glad OBL is dead. Do we have closure now?