Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on February 2013

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker garnered six Oscars in 2010, including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay. She (along with writer Mark Boal) was just warming up. This tremendous film rejects cliché, eschews partisan politics, and plays like a thriller, but it’s as much a character study as it is a CIA procedural about the decade-long hunt for the mastermind behind 9/11. Jessica Chastain puts in a fierce performance as the semi-fictionalized central character, inspired by a CIA analyst who alone didn’t buy into the idea that bin Laden was hiding in a cave. For a complex story with a known outcome, it’s consistently suspenseful, the last hour so riveting that you forget you’re in a movie theater. Its genius is in its ambiguity. Yes, we got the guy (title is military speak for 12:30am, the hour the Navy Seals ended the life of the world’s most wanted man), but the ending is more contemplative than triumphal, considering the morally hazy things we had to do to make it happen and the immense costs of revenge. It’s a movie that respects its audience’s intelligence and one that will start discussions about profoundly troubling issues, and you are left to form your own conclusions.