YMMV / Zero Dark Thirty

• Anticlimax Boss: Osama bin Laden gets nailed through the head as soon as he opens the door. Justified, since he is an unarmed old man going up against a team of Navy SEALS, defended by only two of his goons and that's more or less exactly what happened in real life.
• Award Snub:
  • Kathryn Bigelow's omission as a Best Director nominee at the Oscars was widely seen as this.
  • The film also lost in nearly every other category it was nominated for, with the exception of a win (shared with Skyfall) in the decidedly minor category of Sound Editing. This was especially glaring considering that it was a very strong contender in all categories before losing steam in the wake of controversy over its torture scenes—in particular, Jessica Chastain went from being a certainty for Best Actress when the film was first released to a long shot by the time the awards ceremony rolled around.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The film relies on people being familiar with Pakistan's ISI ^note their notoriously corrupt intelligence service, who James Gandolfini is playing ^note then-CIA head Leon Panetta, and so forth. Heck, the film's poster image only makes sense to those who know that it is a satellite image of OBL's estate.
  • By reading No Easy Day, a book written by one of the SEAL raiders, a lot more knowledge and information becomes clear about the raid and the SEALs.
    • Ironically the book was published after film production had ended, and it confirms the existence of "Maya" (called "Jen" in the book). Jessica Chastain has talked of reading the book and being amazed at how much of Maya's scenes and dialogue ("100 percent") are reflected in the book. Even the film's last scene of Maya crying is reported in the book.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The film used consultants from the CIA that said the use of Enhanced Interrogation had led to Osama Bin Laden, but in 2014 a Democrat led committee released the CIA's reports on the Enhanced Interrogations (Torture) of accused Terrorists, and the reports showed that at no time had the CIA been able to use any information gained through torture, which makes the opening scenes where torture only leaves a prisoner broken and screaming all the more resonant.
  • Further, the real life woman who was partially the inspiration for Maya (she was a Composite Character) was revealed in that same report to be a key architect of that same torture program.
  • The scene where Dan strips a Muslim man naked in front of Maya to humiliate him is even more disturbing after Muslim torture victims revealed that they considered forced nudity to be worse than any of the other torture methods.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: John Barrowman's presence became somewhat funnier after this headline in the papers◊ could be misread as a certain Time Lord having helped from his cell.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The film went from being a very strong Oscar contender to a long shot by the time of the ceremony due to conflict over its torture sequences.
• Shipping: A lot of fans of the film have taken to shipping Maya with Dan.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Dan is obviously supposed to a morally grey figure, the fact that he receives no punishment or even criticism for being a ruthless Torture Technician (a job he clearly chose because he’s good at it) besides losing his pet monkeys makes it difficult to feel bad for him or even feel good about him leaving his job, since it has nothing to do with morality. It can be kinda hard to feel for someone you just watched humiliate and torture a man who could be innocent. It also doesn't help that a lot of his methods are eerily similar to those used at Abu Ghraib.

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