The final shot lingers on Jessica Chastain's face as she sits alone in a military aircraft. The pilot asks her, "Where do you want to go?" She starts to cry, her face listless. She doesn't know. And either do we, suggests Kathryn Bigelow. With our elusive public enemy number one murdered, after more than a decade of hunting, what gives our tortured and violent post-9/11 lives meaning now? Interestingly, Bigelow and her Hurt Locker writer, Mark Boal, have used Zero Dark Thirty not only as the exploration of the hunt for bin Laden, but also to pose a potent question about life after his defeat. It has been crafted as a vehicle to perfectly encapsulate the post-9/11 psyche, but the extent to which it succeeds is questionable.
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