Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

I've just been to see Zero Dark Thirty, and although I don't usually write reviews of things I read or see or listen to, beyond saying 'I liked it' or, more rarely, 'I didn't like it', I feel somehow compelled to say that I liked this movie a great deal, and that the whole furore (ah, that's why I'm compelled to write about it! A good wholesome furore!) about whether or not it 'endorses torture', or suggests that torture was a useful tool in finding and killing Osama Bin Laden, doesn't seem to me to be the point of the movie. It's a film about knowledge, about how we process information, and the moral uncertainty that arises from this process. It's about how the world (in this instance the political world, the world of spycraft, but I think this applies to the world in general) is never purely black and white.
Three moments:
1. Maya (Jessica Chastain), the protagonist, says at one point something along the lines of: 'I've lost a lot of friends, I feel that I've been left behind to get Osama for them'. In the context of the movie, this kind of eschatological understanding of the mission is quite clearly naive: it may be (it's not entirely clear that it is) what Maya thinks, but we are never given any kind of (with apologies) Hollywood-style implied statement that she is right.
2. CIA chief James Gandolfini asks people round a table to say, yes or no, whether they think Osama Bin Laden is in the house that he may have been tracked down to. Only Maya says, unequivocally, yes; everyone else gives generally positive numbers between 60% and 80%. James Gandolfini is naturally a little put out by this.
3. When they finally get Bin Laden, they find his archives. 'Give me ten minutes to get it all bagged up,' the head of the squad says. 'You've got four before the Pakistani airforce get there,' his commanding officer tells him over the radio. They end up leaving half the archive there.
Unless you can tie up every loose end to every question in every situation, which, given the fact that life is messy, you can't, then solutions to particular problems (from 'Where is Osama Bin Laden?' to 'What Happened Last Night?') will always be a matter of reconstructing possible paths through disorganised chaos, and if you arrive at the 'right' answer, then you are lucky. Quid est veritas, as someone once said.