BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Though it hops continents while depicting epochal events, “Zero Dark Thirty” retains a remarkably narrow focus.

To tell the saga of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal follow a junior but obsessive CIA analyst Maya around Pakistan, Afghanistan and Langley, Va.

Though vividly played by Jessica Chastain, Maya has no backstory, no likes, no dislikes, no life. She is the Woman with Nothing but a Name. That, and tunnel-vision determination to kill Osama.

Unlike some other of Hollywood’s other recent valentines to the CIA, this is one is bloody, not so much tough love as brutal love. And in Maya, a neophyte parachuted into the frontlines of intelligence, “Zero Dark Thirty” offers not just a stand-in for the audience but for the entire country.

One of the movie’s most effective tools may still be too much for some viewers. The dark screen opening features telephone messages and 911 calls from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Fortunately, Bigelow lets this run just long enough to provide the context for what follows.

What follows immediately is Maya’s arrival at a CIA forward base in time to watch another American agent, Dan (Jason Clarke), cheerfully torturing al-Qaeda suspect Ammar (Reda Kateb).

Maya is initially squeamish, standing in a corner trying to keep down her breakfast. But she is also ready to assume this is necessary. Shortly, she will be filling the pitcher for waterboarding. Eventually, she herself will be interrogating a prisoner with a burly man at her side, ready to deliver a punch at a nod of her head.

But their first success comes when Maya tricks Ammar. Although Dan’s torture sessions failed to head-off a bloody bombing, Maya pretends that they worked. The Americans happily tell Emmar that during one period of sleep deprivation and blackouts, he broke and gave them the warning.

Now, as he wolfs down the nice “thank you” lunch they are giving him on a pleasant verandah, Ammar goes with the flow, and actually serves up useful information. It is a name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, someone well known in al-Qaeda circles even if Ammar is not precisely sure what the man does.

Maya instantly recognizes it as a nom de guerre. Learning the real name, and putting flesh to it, becomes the needle that she spends a decade hunting, through political and policy changes, CIA in-fighting, bullets and bombs.

Assured and intelligent, if ultimately depressing, these long opening scenes set a high bar for the rest of “Zero Dark Thirty.” Unfortunately, like the intelligence apparatus, Boal’s episodic, jargon-heavy approach often gets in its own way.

A handful of charismatic actors do make impressions, even if information about their characters also seems to be only available on a need-to-know basis. Once Maya gets a dusky desk in a corner of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, she meets the rest of the very small team actually chasing leads on bin Laden.

Jennifer Ehle makes a strong impression as Jessica, the female analyst already part of the group. Initially, she seems happy to see the hard-charging new girl shot down by CIA station chief Joseph Gardner (Kyle Chandler). But as time passes, they become friends even as they pursue different approaches to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Gardner stands in for the rest of the national security establishment in the movie’s big scene of “acting!” Convinced that Bin Laden is off hiding in a cave, Chandler yells no one is interested in relic hunting, Chastain screams back that he’s going to have to tell the world how he let the terrorist mastermind get away.

The script provides a few other characters with moments, but without necessarily bothering to explain who they are. There are lots of references to the ISI, without mentioning that it is the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the Pakistani equivalent to the CIA.

Meanwhile, we drop in on Maya for the occasional meeting or explosion, but without the linking scenes that might convey more of her character or the actual progress of the search for Bin Laden.