Gadget Blog

Troubling examination of the hunt for Bin Laden is somewhat more enjoyable than being waterboarded

In the post-Homeland world, Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning  War-on-Terror treatise suffers somewhat from being rooted in  that boring old place, reality. As ultra-motivated yet conflicted  Carrie, sorry Maya (Jessica Chastain), searches desperately for  terror leader Abu Nazir, sorry Osama Bin Laden, the excitement  is reduced by the fact we know perfectly well how this story pans  out: a raid, a brief shootout and the cold corpse of a dangerous man  being “buried at sea”. Along the way, there’s a lot of “enhanced  interrogation” (torturing people), but ZDT is nowhere near deep  enough a film to make that feel like anything more than an incidentaldetail. However, as always with Bigelow, the action scenes and the  everyday details of people doing extraordinary jobs, from Navy  SEALs to CIA interrogators, do ring absolutely true.