“Kathryn Bigelow is a female director who makes “male” movies. Just look at Point Break or The Hurt Locker”. Nearly every review I’ve ever read about Ms. Bigelow either starts like this or mentions it at some point. This is very confusing to me. There are literally hundreds of male directors who make “female” movies every week, but no one ever feels the need to mention the gender of the director in a short review. Garry Marshall has made a career out of so-called “chick flicks” (ie Princess Diaries, Beaches, those shitty holiday movies with literally ALL of Hollywood staring in them) but no one ever asks, “how can a male director can make female-centric movies?” With each new movie Bigelow makes, the fact that she is female is ALWAYS addressed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Filmmaking is (and always has been) a male-dominated art form so its great and noteworthy when a talented female director comes along. But what makes Bigelow such an interesting filmmaker is the fact that the movies she makes never cater to the fact that she is female. Unlike Penny Marshall or Nora Ephron, Bigelow’s films deal with very traditionally “manly” topics: bank-robbing, nuclear submarines, bomb dismantling in Iraq. I think she said it best, “It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. It is.” Personally, I would love to see more women making movies and I hope directors such as Bigelow, Mary Lambert, Jane Campion, Mary Harron and Lena Dunham pave the way to a future where one doesn’t have to start a review of a fantastic film like Zero Dark Thirty talking about the importance of female directors.

Now to the movie. Zero Dark Thirty is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. When I watch movies like this one, I’m in awe of how the writer and director are able to jam so much information into a cohesive film. This is Bigelow’s Zodiac or JFK. Like those films, Zero Dark Thirty deals with an obsessed individual trying to solve a mystery while displaying extreme amounts of research and theories. Zero tells the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain giving her best performance since Tree of Life) thrown into a world of torture and espionage, tasked with finding the elusive Osama bin Laden. Like Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling, Maya is a woman in a man’s world (and one could argue Bigelow is as well, but that’s a little obvious). In Lambs, director Jonathan Demme constantly framed the petite Jodie Foster standing next to large, muscular men. In Zero, Bigelow has characters refer to Maya as “the girl” or have them ignore her entirely. It’s obvious that Maya is the smartest, strongest character in the movie, but she must work for the others to understand this. At one point during a political meeting, Maya interrupts the men to explain what they are missing and the men look shocked. One man asks, “and who are you, dear” and she responds “I’m the mother fucker who found his place, sir.”

Everyone knows how the film ends. *SPOILER ALERT* Osama bin Laden is killed. But the leading up to his death is one of the most suspenseful scenes I’ve seen in a very long while. The Navy Seals hired with infiltrating bin Laden’s fortress are extreme professionals. When he is finally killed, it is not done in “showy” or cinematic fashion. Instead, he is shot… quickly and almost boringly. The Seal who kills him doesn’t even realize what he did. I found the direction in this scene fantastic. In lesser (or more, lets say, cinematic) hands, his death would be shown in slow motion to extend the action and emotion of the scene. But this is not that kind of film. This is not 300 or Kill Bill. It is extremely realistic, much like a documentary.

I’m quite surprised that Kathryn Bigelow didn’t get a Best Director nomination in the Academy Awards. It seems they pick the lesser of all the best directors in any given year and nominate them. I mean come on, Behn Zeitlin or Michael Haneke are NOT better directors than Bigelow, Tarantino or even Ben Affleck, but I digress. The direction was the most interesting aspect of Zero Dark Thirty. I can’t wait to see it again to catch more information (some of the Palestian names get confusing, especially when many people have 5 different aliases). I rate it 17/17 on the Sitzmatic scale (or a 10/10 on the Deuce Scale).

Has anyone else seen this? Did you like it? I’m interested because I know it’s gotten a lot of controversy from both political sides.