January may be cold and without notable holidays (Martin Luther King day weekend is irrelevant to Canadians), but one thing I like doing this month is running through 2012 films I haven’t seen yet. Screeners from late 2012 films released to try and get Oscar nominations also usually begin to pop up online. Thus it’s a good time to go on a run of them.

I saw Zero Dark Thirty on one of these screeners. And I was surprised at how little I liked it. In fact it may be my least favorite film of 2012.

Zero Dark Thirty’s ambition is to feel real. It wants to sit in on the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden with no heroes or villains or political message, instead just stating here’s what happened. Case in point, its aesthetic is a cold “naturalistic” docu-drama look. It goes out of its way to avoid the storytelling highs and lows and dramatization of most political thrillers.

A problem I have with this is that the film in fact fails to feel like reality. The script and supporting characters are often stagey. The CIA members play like they do in most TV shows, barking in raised voices about following orders and the impossibility of the task we know Jessica Chastain’s character will eventually accomplish. The terrorists are played in a similarly one-noted way. Compounding this is the surprisingly high amount of actors in the film known to most people for their TV roles – such as Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights, James Gandolfini of the Sopranos, Chris Pratt of Parks and Rec, Harold Perrineau of Lost. Putting these stagey, TV like performances in a film otherwise attempting to document reality, undermined much of that attempt to me. But most damaging to the film’s attempt to create a real look at the manhunt, is the treatment of Chastain’s character Maya. A decision is clearly made to play Maya as a character numb to emotion or normal human enjoyment, as a singularly focused Bin Laden hunter. The obsession with this hunt is supposed to have zapped her humanity. But the inability for Chastain to feel like real human being, goes directly against the film’s attempt to feel like a real and natural document of this manhunt. It was nearly impossible for me to believe I was watching a real person during Chastain’s performance. Making a character less than real to push a thematic message (in this case, the numbing effect of obsession) is something I don’t have a problem with, the issue is that it’s directly juxtaposed against a film that otherwise seems to want to be real and a naturalistic document.

To its credit, Zero Dark Thirty does start with an superbly executed torture scene, for which it’s drawing controversy. The heart of this scene is Jason Clarke who in my opinion has the best character and role in the film, as a torturer on the verge of losing his soul after the acts he’s committed. Unfortunately Clarke is sparsely used after the first act and the film suffers for it.

A fascinating contrast to Zero Dark Thirty is the film Argo. Argo is the anti-Zero Dark Thirty. It relishes dramatizing its story and plot, making larger than life leads and side characters, making its characters likeable enough that the audience cheers for their success. Stagey side characters such as Bryan Cranston or John Goodman’s roles in the film, fit perfectly because Argo knows it is a film. It attempts to entertain its audience and not pretend to be a real document. Zero Dark Thirty is a much less entertaining and engrossing film because of its specific decision to avoid dramatizing its plot and characters. It basically says “This is art, fuck entertaining casual audiences”. This would be fine if it achieved its goal of being a terrifically natural and real document of the events, but to me it doesn’t succeed at that either. Thus Zero Dark Thirty ends up being a film that neither has its cake or eats it. It neither feels real nor is it engrossing a film. I found it then to be an overlong bore that lay dead with no pulse the vast majority of its running time. Argo is not a perfect film, but I’d prefer it over Zero Dark Thirty every day. If Argo is a well produced, catchy pop song, Zero Dark Thirty is an angsty song on acoustic guitar by an open mic songwriter who believes they are more artistically significant than the “shallow” pop artists. The problem with this angsty song is that it lacks any hook or life making it enjoyable to listen to. Compounding this is that not only is it no fun to listen to, it contains no more depth or creativity than the pop song anyways, if not less than it.

Magnus, once again, is wrong.

You Americans suck at placing commas.

You Americans suck at placing commas.

Only thing I remember is "Osama...Osama", Dan feeding the monkeys, "I'm the mother fucker" line, and Chastain giving the same dull look throughout the entire movie.