Zero Dark Thirty starts with the 911 calls played over a black empty frame. Indeed, no images are needed to remind the audience of the horror and the time the voices were recorded— the “infamous” September 11, 2001. For its first few minutes, the movie is a picture-less document of terror. With one woman’s desperate cry, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” the film begins.

Zero Dark Thirty, based on first-hand accounts of ac-tual events, tell the behind-the-scenes story of the greatest manhunt of all time: the hunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks at World Trade Center.

The first scene of the film is quite shocking. One agent from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), Dan (Jason Clarke), subjects the prisoner to “enhanced interrogation,” of Bin Laden’s whereabouts. Yet it is merely a torture with pain and humiliation. Then there is someone else at the interrogation session: an observer, who wears a black hood and later removes it to shake out a curtain of reddish-gold hair. This is Maya (Jessica Chastain), based on a real agent, who becomes the key CIA agent. Maya is depicted as a character with no personal life or interests, only obsessed with getting Bin Laden.

Maya is not the traditional character; rather, she acts as the embodiment of America’s relentless drive to achieve a single goal. The film shows how Maya’s character develops and hardens over years from neophyte to tireless cynic and back into a vulnerable, feeling, human being, during the tracking of Osama Bin Laden. In the first torture scenes, she seems intimidated compared with the more-experienced Dan. As the search progresses, though, Maya transforms into a passionate leader of the case. Maya fights for the only case she has ever known, persistent on capturing the world’s most wanted-man. The hunt feels like one continuous surge of energy, colored by anguish. Then she comes to question whether sacrificing her whole life for one target is really worth it.

Over ten years, numerous terrorist attacks happen around the globe such as the London bombings in 2005 where CIA operatives get killed. Many of them being Maya’s close friends, the hunt for Bin Laden becomes even more personal for her. Maya’s obsession leads to her theory that the best way to find Bin Laden is to actually track down his personal courier, who will evidently lead the team to their target. Maya and her colleagues attempt to locate this courier, an eight- year journey that involves surveillance, battles for resources, frustrating delays, life-threatening risks, and old-fashioned detective work. When the courier is finally located and leads to a suspicious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Maya is convinced that this must be Bin Laden's hideout. Though this theory does not sit well with the suits in Washington, Maya sticks to her guns until Bin Laden is ultimately killed in his compound in May, 2011.

The scene that people may be expecting from Zero Dark Thirty comes at the very last 40 minutes of the nearly three- hour film. The director successfully reenacts the house in Pakistan that led to the Navy SEAL team assassinating Osama Bin Laden. It is a spectacularly tense and realistic scene, full of adrenaline. When Bin Laden is finally captured, however, the music does not distract the scene and nobody cheers as if he or she won the game. The audience is not cheering for America; but is rather worrying for Maya and what she is supposed to do with her life now.

Kathryn Bigelow, the director, is the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director. She is not only a role model for women in filmmaking, but also for any filmmaker involved in making films of political or historical relevance. Bigelow is an expert in telling a politically sensitive issue in the most neutral way. She is praised for her gritty realism on the military and American obsession with war; Bigelow seems to be developing a trademark kind of film.

Moreover, the screenwriter, Mark Boal, who was a former investigative journalist, does more than just stating the facts; he did a great job in creating an innovative storyline solely based on first-hand accounts. His script, combined with Bigelow’s distinctive camera-work, makes the film seem like a documentary. There is the sense that the movie progresses according to a dry bullet-point list of dates and events, rather than a strong narrative through line. At the same time, the director added weight, insight and gravity to each event so that the viewers pause to explore.

Zero Dark Thirty ended up nabbing five Oscar nomina-tions, including one for best picture. The film claims that it is faithful to the facts, truthful, journalistic, and living his-tory. It is like a puzzle that keeps changing and re-forming; a top-notch suspense drama, but the enjoyment of the film will lie greatly in the viewer’s ability to mentally navigate through details, names and locations. So much information stuffed into a nearly three hour run time makes this film a challenging viewing, somewhat hard to follow. Most of the names are foreign and similar sounding, many characters wear turbans, so they are hard to differentiate, and Bigelow rarely uses subtitles. The result is feeling a bit lost, but perhaps that is Bigelow’s intention. She threw the audience straight into the chaos of war, in the frenzied urgency of trying to track down Bin Laden.

The film shows but not tells, always maintaining the objective narrative’s presence in the scene. That is why the message may seem vague and unclear to the viewers. The torture scenes might offend some viewers as well. Some critics have claimed that the torture scenes in the film reflect the moral ambiguity of the torture debate. As the movie crosses a bloody, violent decade, it gains a fearsome momentum, but it never resorts to triumph or offers an easy emotional release. Repeatedly, scenes suggest a significant cost for even a small victory and question simple assumptions.

The determining factor between those who will love it, and those who will hate it, is how well the viewer understands the historical background and the events of the film. It seemed difficult as a Korean spectator to fully empathize while watching the film. Zero Dark Thirty is neither an entertaining film nor a time-killing material, but rather a serious documentary. Overall, however, it is a brilliant procedural of unlocked information that plays to your intelligence, also visually accomplished with terrifyingly amazing cinematography.