For Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, the task at hand was familiar. For the leading lady Jessica Chastain, it was a whole new endeavor considering the gravity of the project. Nonetheless, they both succeeded.

Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, this historical drama is the brainchild of Bigelow and Mark Boal. Zero Dark Thirty is “the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man,” or at least that’s what its creators are coining it. And truly, it is the dramatization of the investigation to find Osama Bin Laden after Sept. 11, 2001.

The movie focuses in on CIA agent Maya (Chastain) who, recruited right out of high school, feels it is her destiny to find and kill Bin Laden following the death of her CIA friends.

The 35-year-old actress entered the cinema game late, making her film debut in 2008’s Jolene and then starring in seven major motion pictures in 2011.

Her most notable role prior to Zero Dark Thirty was in 2011’s The Help for which she received an Academy Award and Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In The Help, Chastain plays bubbly southern belle Celia Foote, whose highest aspirations include marrying a rich southern gent and having lots of babies.

I was expecting to look up at the screen and see Celia Foote, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Chastain completely immersed herself in the role of Maya and she had me believing it from the first second. Maya’s fiery personality and liking for the ‘F-word’ made the character one of my all time favorites. She is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and has already won the Golden Globe under the same category.

Unlike Chastain, Bigelow was not personally nominated by the Academy.

Bigelow impressed viewers everywhere with 2009’s The Hurt Locker, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Director, becoming the first woman to win the award and inching out her ex-husband James Cameron for his work on Avatar.

Many feel Bigelow’s lack of a nomination is a snub because of all the controversy surrounding the movie’s content. According to BBC News, Bigelow herself admitted the controversy involved  may have been the reason she was left out.

Zero Dark Thirty is a very similiar project to The Hurt Locker, taking place in the Middle East and tackling the complexities of the “War on Terror”, while primarily featuring military and government personnel. Although the film focuses in on Maya and exposes some of her internal struggle, it lacks the same depth that The Hurt Locker possessed, most likely because Zero Dark Thirty was clearly a bigger project with a closer look behind the desks of CIA operatives as a result of the diplomatic aspects.

Despite the fact that I as well as everyone else in the audience knew the ending, I found myself on the edge of my seat the entire time and sometimes jumping out of it. Bigelow’s work developed so much suspense as the story unfolded and the agents zeroed in on their target. The relentless pursuit by Maya becomes the driving force in the story.

Another key performance was by Friday Night Lights star Kyle Chandler who also appeared in Oscar-nominee Argo. Chandler plays a CIA Station Chief whom Maya works directly under. Their relationship of consistently bumping heads was a very enjoyable part of the film.

Also worth noting is the work of Boal, writer and co-producer of Zero Dark Thirty. Boal also wrote the screenplay for The Hurt Locker, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) and is, not surprisingly, nominated again. Boal has taken much of the heat surrounding the film’s controversial plot.

The press and politicians have been questioning the apparently pro-torture stance it takes as well as where Boal and others received their classified information. The film has even prompted a Senate inquiry. From a viewer’s point-of-view, the film seemed honest, and the torture and bombing scenes just added to my emotional response to the movie. Torture did result in information that helped lead them to Bin Laden, but ironically one of the more successful interrogations happened because the agents tricked an informant into giving them information by treating him with kindness.

Despite the film’s late premiere, (it was pushed back three months because Obama opponents felt the success of the mission advertised him), and to no surprise on my part, Zero Dark Thirty has greatly succeeded at the box office, grossing just under $25 million combined during its two staggered opening weekends.

The film’s real worth is the thought it provokes from viewers as they question whether the entire ten-year investigation was really all worth it. The film majorly depicts the effort put in and lengths taken to find a single man. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it, but the film educates Americans about the endeavor and shows that killing Bin Laden wasn’t just a single mission. It was a decade of time spent and lives lost to find him and kill him.

US citizens paraded through the streets and chanted “U-S-A!” on May 2, 2011 when Bin Laden’s death was officially announced. Yet at the end of Zero Dark Thirty, when Bin Laden’s death unfolded, no one in the theater clapped or even uttered a word.