Zero Dark Thirty/Skyfall

Or, Give My Regards to Langley.

I've realized this week that I'm massively behind in my movie reviewing, and so I asked myself which movies I'd seen recently could co-star in a review. This pairing might seem like an odd double feature, but in a way, Zero Dark Thirty is what a Bond movie might be if the CIA rather than MI-6 was the starring agency. And not only do we have MI-6 facing off against the CIA in this review, we also have two Oscar-winning directors going head-to-head: Sam Mendes for Skyfall, and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. Let the fireworks begin!

James Bond is notorious for his disrespect for legally constituted authority. He does whatever it takes to get his man, and he always does. If he breaks a few laws, or destroys a few buildings, in the process, what of it? Of course, I don't remember James Bond torturing anybody. Perhaps that's because he has been tortured himself, in Casino Royale–a scene that makes Film School Rejects' list of the Ten Best Torture Scenes in American Cinema.

It's possible that Zero Dark Thirty is aiming to push Casino Royale off the list. At the beginning of the movie, Jessica Chastain's CIA agent Maya finds herself witnessing the interrogation of a suspect at a CIA "Black Site." The interrogator, Dan (Jason Clarke) strings him up, parades him around naked, waterboards him, and stuffs him in a small box. The reaction shots of Maya make very clear that she is very uncomfortable watching. But it's not long into the movie before she is eagerly participating in these tactics. 

The movie makes clear that they are necessary because they work. All of the important developments leading to bin Laden are attributed to the torture allowed during the Bush administration. One suspect says: "I don't want to be tortured again," and spills his guts right away. There is even a scene in which President Obama appears on screen declaring an end to the torture of detainees at black sites, and the characters simply look away, as if they are embarrassed by the commander-in-chief. 

If watching the torture scenes makes you uncomfortable, the movie seems to say, you just can't handle the truth. Unlike Bigelow's previous masterpiece, The Hurt Locker, which allowed viewers to choose how they wanted to interpret the politics of the film, Zero Dark Thirty allows no such ambiguity. Every terrorist attack since 9/11 is interwoven into the film–most on television, but a few directly affect the characters. In the film's world, terrorism is very real, very personal, and very threatening. Zero Dark Thirty takes place in a very dark, very imperfect world, and it seems to say that the good guys can't be perfect either.

Skyfall has a very similar and not very deeply hidden political agenda. After Bond's acerbically amusing boss M (Judi Dench) is blamed for losing a maguffin (in this case, a list of undercover agents), the legally constituted authorities call her on the carpet and grill her. One prattling minister proclaims MI-6 completely unnecessary in the modern world. M attempts to claim that there are shadowy threats in the world that MI-6 is necessary to defend the realm against, but the minister doesn't seem to buy it. If you suspect that this blowhard will have the urgent necessity of MI-6 personally demonstrated to her before the movie is out, you will not be disappointed. 

Zero Dark Thirty also has an M of sorts–Joseph Bradley, the CIA station chief (Kyle Chandler). Bradley's role in the movie is the spineless bureaucrat who doesn't believe in Maya's hypothesis that a shadowy figure named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti will lead them to bin Laden, and won't give her the resources to pursue it–until she delivers a rather histrionic soliloquy calling him out and personally attacking him. You wouldn't think this would be the right way to get what you want, but evidently in the CIA it can work. 

Or at least, it works in a movie. It's precisely this kind of Hollywood-playbook plotting that leads me to believe that there's more poetic license than fact in Zero Dark Thirty. Politicians and op-ed columnists have already begun either using the film to underscore their points or attacking it because it undermines them. But it's really irrelevant. Even a movie that's "based on a true story" is still fiction, and it's best treated as such. After all, even James Bond is based on real people that Ian Fleming knew. It's fine to use it as a pretext to open a dialogue about a political subject–movies do that all the time–but treating it as investigative journalism is a huge mistake.

And as fiction, it's beautifully written. Maya is a very compelling heroine, and Bigelow and Chastain easily convince the audience to root for her. First she has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Pakistan to let her pursue Abu Ahmed until he leads her to the Abbottabad complex where bin Laden may be hiding. Then the movie takes a semi-comic turn as Maya returns to Washington and has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Washington to do something about it. In one extended sequence, she grabs a red marker and writes on the glass wall of her superior's office exactly how many days it has been since she located bin Laden that the Agency has done nothing about it.

Zero Dark Thirty stays far away from any personal details that might bog it down. So we learn nothing at all about Maya's past, or her personal life. This is no doubt to avoid casting any aspersions of soap opera on a "serious" film. And yet it is the fact that Skyfall, for the first time, delves into 007's past that helps put it a cut above the average Bond film; This might actually be the only movie where Bond has an actual character arc. Skyfall is really about Bond's filial relationship with M, a relationship that is threatened by the appearance of an evil foster brother-in-arms (the villain Silva, played by Javier Bardem). And there's even a hint of an origin story, as Bond goes back to the remote corner of Scotland he hails from.

Have no fear that Bond will spend much time nattering with his maiden aunts, though. These are both action movies, and both have some stupendous action sequences. In the case of Skyfall, the best may be the one in a deserted Shanghai office tower. In this scene, Bond follows his prey to an empty upper floor of a steel-and-glass skyscraper, and the two of them battle each other, silhouetted, wrapped in neon like the naked women in the opening sequence of every Bond film. 

It's interesting to note the progression of location shoots in the Bond series; once upon a time, 007 spent most of his time in Europe. In recent movies, Bond has spent some time in more exotic, if still picturesque, locales (as have his yankee stunt doubles, Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne). In addition to Shanghai, which has become synonymous with neon corporate excess in a way that Tokyo once was, back before the collapse of the Japanese economy, Bond drops in on Macau and Istanbul in this installment.

Maya pursues her quarry across the globe as well, but the locations are less picturesque: Islamabad, Gdansk, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kuwait. In general, Zero Dark Thirty's grittier locations work to the film's advantage, allowing it to be bigger than life and yet just realistic enough to be believable. Bigelow and cinematographer Greig Fraser have wisely chosen to avoid the fake-documentary feel that, at this point, is reserved for monster movies (although see my review of Chronicle for a counterexample where it works). Instead, the frame is often characterized by a desert bleakness, punctuated by bursts of occasional subcontinental color.

I often joke that although the movie Titanic takes a lot of potshots, the real sign that it's a great movie is the moment when you find yourself thinking, gosh, I really hope the ship doesn't sink. Zero Dark Thirty chalks up a similar success when the Navy SEAL team finally attacks bin Laden's complex, and you find yourself on the edge of your seat, wondering if the operation will succeed, or whether the team will actually find bin Laden before the Pakistani air force arrives. 

The entire sequence takes place at night, so the cinematographer has little to work with other than night-goggle green. But this is where the editors, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor (both Oscar-nominated), really shine. A sequence taking place entirely at night, with the characters all shrouded in identical fatigues and goggles, might easily become completely incomprehensible. Taking a mountain of footage like that and transforming it into something completely understandable, but still too suspenseful for a bathroom break, is truly a remarkable achievement.

I don't know if I've truly done either movie justice in this review; there seems to be so much more about both of them worth discussing. But one last thing that the two movies have in common is that they are both emphatically worth seeing.