Film shows the 'difficult, emotional' quest for bin Laden

>> zero dark thirty" begins with a black screen and the sounds of the 9/11 calls. it's a pain we've stuffed down but we're still mourning 9/11 the way a shocking death in the family leaves you in permanent mourning. after 9/11 america went through the stages of grief, though mostly we were in anger and wanting revenge and that's what this extraordinary film chronicles, the painstaking path to vengeance. director catherine bigelow who won the oscar for "the hurt locker," takes us inside the black sites an detention centers and the cia offices where military contractors and intelligence operatives battled to extract the information that would find bin laden . bigelow is so focused on authenticity that the film fungss in an element documentary-like style as she underdramatizes this dramatic story. it's stripped of hollywood schmaltz or over stylization to tell this important narrative in a harrowing way. we watched waterboarding and bloody men dragged across boards in dog collars and it forces to you reconfront your beliefs about torture. i have always been steadfastly against torture as if felt like nothing less than compromising the american soul and giving our enemies in al qaeda a gift they could use to inspire and recruit and pragmatically we know little to know actionable intelligence came to torture. detective work and treating detainees with respect is more effective but as i watch contractors beat our enemies to a pulp, i wondered if i were in their boots during that time of war charged with making radicalized men talk on behalf of an angry nation m mourning could i have not ftortured? i imagine that if i had been cia at that difficult moment in history, i probably would have done what they did. it's a difficult, emotional journey. bombs explode, people die, and you recall those years when you lived on the edge because you felt like any violent thing could happen at any second. and yet as the years go on, you understand why institutional exhaustion crept in and the men at the upper levels of the cia grew weary of the search. but for the obsessive determination of one woman, the film says, we might have let the trail grow cold. this film is inner turmoil free. the cia operative chasing after bin laden for years seems made of steel. the final assault is a long creep through a big house in pakistan. say what you will, but when that seal said for god and country , geronimo, i almost cried. when one pauses to say, wow, i just shot bin laden , another barks get back to work. it's been called a post political war film as it expresses no pro, or constance on war. i think oscar just might agree. that