Remarkably, it’s taken Kathryn Bigelow all of two films to transform from an also-ran action director to the most revered and dependable cinematic chronicler of American’s early 21st century of global militaristic angst. Unless there are people out there who actually discerned some sort of Cold War profundities in the doze-inducing K-19: The Widowmaker (or, more ludicrously, any depth whatsoever in the idiotic and strangely celebrated Point Break), Bigelow hadn’t exhibited especially insightful command of the dire doings of geopolitics before connecting with screenwriter Mark Boal, who, like her, won a deserved Academy Award for strong work on The Hurt Locker. Following that film’s narrative extrapolation of the circular misery of the Iraq war, Bigelow and Boal turn their attention to the CIA’s manhunt for Osama bin Laden following the attacks of 9/11, bringing the story all the way up to Seal Team Six’s successful raid on the terrorist leader’s compound in the Pakistan city of Abbottabad. If journalism is the first draft of history, Bigelow delivers the second draft with Zero Dark Thirty.

In the film, Jessica Chastain plays a young CIA officer named Maya. She was drafted by the agency right out of high school, presumably because of some particular brilliance. She’s certainly driven, alert and intense. Maya is reportedly based on a real CIA agent, seemingly the same one that gives the rocket fuel inspiration to the brilliantly jittery performance of Claire Danes in Showtime’s Homeland (there’s already plenty of speculation along those very lines). Chastain is quietly sensational in the role, just as she has been in just about every film appearance she’s made since practically coming out of nowhere just two years ago. The character seems a little wispy in conception, but Chastain expertly tracks her journey from someone initially uncertain about her place on foreign soil, observing the torture of detainees with visible queasiness, to a person with decisive enough command of counter-terrorism efforts that she instinctively, angrily pushes back at the authority figures that aren’t moving fast enough to suit her.

It gets a little spottier when surveying the rest of the cast, which is filled with recognizable faces, often in fairly small roles. As with Maya, many of the parts feel underdrawn, so the film is especially reliant on actors who can add depth to their characters with ingenuity and insight. Someone like Jennifer Ehle thrives in such a situation, while most other performers provide the rough equivalent of keeping a seat warm. There aren’t any major missteps (well, except for Mark Strong, who never met a moment he couldn’t pointlessly overact), but few of the actors make their parts distinctive either, seeming so beholden to serving the procedural narrative of the film that they lose sight of the value of invested personality.

To be fair, that procedural narrative is pretty gripping, largely thanks to the focus and drive of Bigelow, who assembles Zero Dark Thirty with a thrilling equal commitment to accuracy and whatever dramatic devices will deliver the greatest intellectual and emotional punch. This is never more clear than in the depiction of the actual mission which ended in the death of bin Laden. Bigelow skews away from the basic cinematic convention of condensing action and heightening drama, choosing instead to let it play out in what feels roughly like real time, emphasizing that this sort of covert military action is agonizingly slow and methodical, punctuated by violence so sudden that the results of it can’t be sorted out until the aftermath. More than anywhere else in the film, this sequence is clearly where Bigelow feels most at home.

Bigelow and the film have received a great deal of scrutiny and criticism, including from entities that, frankly, should be concentrating their limited time on far more important matters. One of the primary areas of concern is the film’s depiction of CIA operatives using torture on detainees, specifically the implication that useful intelligence was extracted from those methods. I think the fact that torture was used by Americans as matter of policy ratified and celebrated at the highest levels of government is unquestionably reprehensible, but were I writing this before the controversies flared up around film it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have even thought to mention the scenes in question, except maybe to note that Bigelow makes the practice looks as brutally awful as I would expect. And though I could never view the deplorable methods as justified, I’m also not so naive as to think that they never yielded useful information (information we surely could have acquired through other means, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful), no matter what the current official word is from government representatives. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that figures in the same powerful posts were assuring us that this program, under the ugly euphemism “enhance interrogation techniques,” was producing a bounty of invaluable intelligence.

In fact, I might argue that the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate that Bigelow is doing exactly what a director shepherding such material to the screen is supposed to do. They are free of authorial moralizing, directing the audience to believe one way or another, instead allowing individuals to project their own beliefs onto the action, seeing it as necessary and heroic or immoral and tragic. The film has its issues, but retroactive justification of the darkening of the national soul in the years when George Bush and Dick Cheney were calling the shots isn’t one of them.