Kathryn Bigelow was the talk of the town a few years back when she won Best Director and Best Picture (among others) at the Oscars for her visceral war film The Hurt Locker. This year she’s back with another war-related film, the sure-to-be controversial Zero Dark Thirty (previously referred to as Kill Bin Laden), again working with her Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal.
The film is about the manhunt and eventual killing of America’s public enemy No. 1 Osama bin Laden. The project was already in the development stages as a film about the search for Bin Laden but the news of his killing, to be quite blunt, gave it the perfect conclusion.
The first teaser for the flick has appeared online which you can view below, complete with a gritty style and blacked out lettering. I’m getting a Homeland meets Body of Lies vibe from this one, what do you think?
Zero Dark Thirty stars Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler and Edgar Ramirez. It is scheduled for release in the U.S. on December 19th, 2012 (after being moved from its pre-election October spot in response to accusations of it being an Obama administration propaganda film) with other release dates sure to be announced soon.
The trailer is well-constructed, but maybe it’s my background in history that has me weary of the subject matter for a movie – i.e. we need a little more distance, declassification of documents, etc. before we’ll ever truly know the details. Until then, this will probably just be a nice piece of entertaining historical fiction.
Apparently Boal and Bigelow were given “unprecedented access to top-secret documents” so that may mean a level of authenticity we haven’t seen before with these types of films. But I agree, failing that it will likely be purely a piece of entertainment. And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with.