+2
I enjoyed watching Zero Dark Thirty - at least most of the movie. But ultimately I found it disjointed.
From the beginning - the agent Maya's initial posting - through to the decision to launch the raid on Bin Laden's compound was captivating. But the actual raid by the Navy Seals and their return seemed like a separate film that didn't fit too well with the first.
In fact, I found the TV movie 'Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden' to be far more suspenseful in its treatment of the stakeout of the Abbotabad compound and the raid itself than Zero Dark Thirty's. (There are criticisms of both films in terms of accuracy and since they deal with undercover agents it's hard to know what is true and what is fabricated or speculation.)
I find it interesting that all three Kathryn Bigelow movies of the last decade are military movies. The first two - K-17: The Widowmaker and The Hurt Locker - are practically devoid of female characters. Perhaps Bigelow tried to compensate for this lack by centering Zero Dark Thirty around Maya's compulsive search for Bin Laden. This is one of the most contentious parts of her and Mark Boal's plot - creating Maya as the sole CIA hero and downplaying the CIA team effort.
Focusing the story on Maya left Bigelow with a problem when it came to the climactic raid - because Maya was left behind in the Afghanistan base and, for the most part, off-screen. She regains her central focus only in the last couple minutes as apparently being the only one on the base who can identify the corpse of UBL.
I did not feel that Bigelow and Boal were successful in creating an integrated plot from beginning to end. Perhaps if the plot had included - as the Seal Team Six film did - the agents who were supposedly staking out the UBL compound up to the time of the raid, it would have allowed for a more seamless story line. Then again, this would have taken a bit of the focus away from Maya. This might not have been a bad thing - in terms of making a complete film, and also for Zero Dark Thirty's credibility.