Kathryn Bigelow sat in a Los Angeles editing suite in late 2012, assembling footage that would force American audiences to watch their government waterboard a detainee before hunting the world’s most wanted man. Seven thousand miles away and thirteen years later, Aditya Dhar crafted a Karachi underworld saga that would invite Indian audiences to cheer as their operative tore apart Pakistan’s criminal-intelligence nexus from within. Both films depicted covert wars fought on foreign soil against targets designated as existential threats. Both drew from classified or semi-classified operational realities their respective governments preferred to keep quiet. Both became cultural phenomena that reshaped how their nations talked about violence conducted in their name. Yet the two films could hardly be more different in what they chose to show, what they chose to hide, and what those choices reveal about the countries that produced them. Placing Zero Dark Thirty beside Dhurandhar is not an exercise in ranking two spy thrillers. It is an exercise in reading two national psychologies through the stories they tell themselves about the darkest work their governments do.

The comparison matters because both films arrived at moments when their respective nations needed a narrative. America in 2012 was a decade into the War on Terror, exhausted by two ground wars, politically divided over torture and drone strikes, and still processing the catharsis of the Abbottabad raid that had killed Osama bin Laden eighteen months earlier. India in 2025 was grappling with the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, the escalation toward Operation Sindoor, and a shadow war in which unknown gunmen were systematically eliminating India’s most wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil. Each film stepped into a national conversation already in progress and offered a cinematic vocabulary for what the country was doing, had done, or wanted to believe it was doing. Zero Dark Thirty gave America a language of institutional persistence and moral ambiguity. Dhurandhar gave India a language of personal heroism and righteous vengeance. The vocabulary each film provided shaped the conversations that followed, and those conversations continue to shape policy.

Bruce Hoffman, the Georgetown University terrorism scholar and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has spent nearly five decades studying how nations construct their counter-terrorism narratives. His central observation applies directly to the comparison at hand: the stories nations tell about fighting terrorism reveal far more about the nations themselves than about the terrorism they claim to be fighting. Zero Dark Thirty and Dhurandhar are case studies in that principle. They are not documentaries. They are national self-portraits painted during moments of strategic crisis, and the artistic choices each film makes are as revealing as any intelligence assessment.

Jyotirmaya Sharma, the political scientist at the University of Hyderabad whose work on Indian nationalism has traced how cultural production shapes political consciousness, offers a complementary frame. Sharma’s argument that popular culture does not merely reflect political reality but actively constructs the categories through which citizens understand political reality is essential to grasping why the comparison between these two films is not a matter of cinematic criticism but of strategic analysis. When sixty million Indians watched Dhurandhar in its opening weeks and absorbed its framing of covert operations as righteous, personally heroic, and morally uncomplicated, the film was not reflecting a pre-existing consensus. It was building one.

The two directors bring strikingly different filmmaking philosophies to their covert war projects, and those philosophies shape the final products in ways that matter for the comparison. Bigelow came to Zero Dark Thirty from a career defined by rigorous genre filmmaking: Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days, and most significantly The Hurt Locker, the Iraq War film for which she became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director. Her filmmaking is characterized by documentary-inflected cinematography, minimal exposition, and a refusal to emotionally manipulate her audience. She positions her camera as a witness rather than an advocate. Dhar came to Dhurandhar from Uri: The Surgical Strike, a 2019 film about India’s cross-border retaliatory strikes after the Uri attack that became one of the highest-grossing Indian films of that year and whose dialogue, “How’s the josh?”, entered national political rhetoric. Where Bigelow’s career demonstrates a progressive stripping away of genre convention to reveal institutional reality, Dhar’s career demonstrates a progressive amplification of genre convention to serve national mythology. Both approaches are legitimate. Both produce powerful cinema. But they point in opposite directions when applied to the subject of covert operations.

The comparison also requires acknowledging that the two films operate within fundamentally different film industries with different relationships to the state. Hollywood, despite its close relationships with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, maintains an adversarial tradition rooted in the First Amendment and the culture of independent filmmaking. Bigelow and Boal were able to make Zero Dark Thirty because the American system, for all its pressures, allows filmmakers to depict state violence critically without facing legal consequences. Bollywood operates within a regulatory framework that includes the Central Board of Film Certification, informal political pressures from ruling parties and their cultural organizations, and a commercial incentive structure that rewards films aligned with the prevailing national mood. Dhar was able to make Dhurandhar not despite but because of these pressures: the film gave the system what it wanted, and the system gave the film the access, the marketing support, and the cultural endorsement that propelled it to record-breaking commercial success.

Two Films, Two Countries, Two Covert Wars

Zero Dark Thirty opens in darkness. The screen is black. The audience hears real audio recordings from the September 11 attacks: emergency calls, air traffic control transmissions, the sounds of people dying. No images accompany the sound. Bigelow forces her audience to sit in the darkness of that morning and feel the foundational trauma without the numbing familiarity of the footage they have seen a thousand times. The film then cuts to a CIA black site in an unnamed country, where a detainee named Ammar hangs from ceiling chains, and a CIA officer named Dan begins an interrogation that includes waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and humiliation. The first twenty minutes of America’s covert war film are deliberately, brutally uncomfortable. The audience is meant to feel implicated.

Dhurandhar opens differently. Aditya Dhar begins with a montage of real terror attacks that have scarred India: the IC-814 hijacking, the Parliament attack, the 26/11 Mumbai siege that killed 166 people across the city’s landmarks. These are presented not as raw archival footage but as cinematic reconstructions interwoven with newsreel clips, establishing a visual grammar of victimhood that builds toward a single emotional payload: India has been attacked again and again, and the perpetrators have walked free again and again, protected by Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus and its criminal networks. Ranveer Singh’s character, Hamza Ali Mazari, does not appear until the ground for his vengeance has been thoroughly prepared. When he does appear, slipping into Karachi’s underworld with the quiet lethality of a man who has decided that the rules no longer apply, the audience has already been told exactly why he is justified.

The difference in openings is not incidental. It is architectural. Bigelow opens with the cost of the attack and immediately pivots to the cost of the response. Dhar opens with the cost of the attack and uses it to justify everything that follows. Both films are structured around a single question, but the questions are different. Zero Dark Thirty asks: at what price did America kill bin Laden? Dhurandhar asks: should India have been doing this sooner?

These questions produce fundamentally different cinematic experiences. Bigelow’s film is procedural, institutional, and deliberate. The tempo is the tempo of bureaucracy: meetings, briefings, dead ends, personnel transfers, budget arguments, interagency turf wars. The Abbottabad raid, when it finally arrives in the film’s final thirty minutes, lands with the force of accumulated institutional effort rather than individual heroism. Dhar’s film is operatic, personal, and visceral. The tempo is the tempo of the lone wolf who has infiltrated enemy territory and must navigate betrayal, violence, and moral isolation without institutional backup. The climactic dismantling of the Karachi nexus lands with the force of personal will rather than bureaucratic process.

The pacing choices are themselves revealing. Zero Dark Thirty spans approximately ten years of narrative time in 157 minutes. Long stretches of the film involve Maya reviewing documents, waiting for approvals, and arguing with colleagues who believe the bin Laden trail has gone cold. Bigelow deliberately tests her audience’s patience, reproducing the tedium of intelligence work as a cinematic experience. Viewers feel the weight of the years. They feel the bureaucratic inertia. They understand, viscerally, why Maya’s colleagues give up and why she does not. Dhar makes the opposite calculation. Dhurandhar compresses its narrative timeline into three hours of relentless forward momentum. Mazari’s infiltration of Karachi proceeds through a series of escalating confrontations, each more dangerous than the last, each building toward a climax that the film’s structure has made inevitable. Where Bigelow trusts her audience to sit in uncertainty, Dhar trusts his audience to ride the acceleration. Both choices are artistically valid. Both reveal different assumptions about what audiences need from a covert war story: America needs to understand how long it took. India needs to feel how dangerous it was.

Dhar’s pacing strategy reflects a broader difference in how the two film industries conceptualize the relationship between narrative duration and emotional engagement. Hollywood’s prestige thriller tradition, descended from All the President’s Men and The Conversation, treats patience as a virtue: the audience earns the climax by enduring the investigation. Bollywood’s masala thriller tradition, which Dhurandhar both honors and transcends, treats momentum as a virtue: the audience stays engaged because the stakes escalate continuously and the hero is never safe for long. Neither tradition is superior. But each shapes how its audience processes the covert operations depicted: slowly and analytically in the American case, quickly and emotionally in the Indian case.

The treatment of intelligence work itself diverges along similar lines. Bigelow shows intelligence as primarily analytical. Maya’s greatest scenes involve her sitting at a desk, staring at data, and making connections that others have missed. The intelligence breakthrough that eventually identifies bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, comes not from a dramatic field operation but from a patient re-examination of detainee files that have been sitting in CIA databases for years. Dhar shows intelligence as primarily operational. Mazari’s greatest scenes involve him navigating physical and social threats in real time, reading people rather than files, and improvising when plans collapse. Bigelow’s intelligence is static and cumulative. Dhar’s intelligence is dynamic and improvisational. The difference maps onto a deeper cultural assumption about what intelligence officers actually do: in America’s imagination, they analyze. In India’s imagination, they act.

This structural divergence maps onto a deeper cultural difference. America’s relationship with its covert operations is mediated by institutions: the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Inspector General, the press. India’s relationship with its covert operations, particularly the shadow war documented in this series, is mediated by the absence of institutions: no official acknowledgment, no parliamentary oversight, no public accounting of what RAW and its partner agencies do on Pakistani soil. Bigelow’s film reflects an institutional framework that exists and interrogates it. Dhar’s film reflects an institutional vacuum and fills it with mythology.

Institutional Machinery Against Personal Heroism

The most fundamental divergence between Zero Dark Thirty and Dhurandhar lies in how each film answers a deceptively simple question: who did this? In Bigelow’s telling, the hunt for bin Laden was accomplished by an institution. Maya, the protagonist played by Jessica Chastain, is the emotional center of the film, but she operates within a vast bureaucratic apparatus that alternately supports and obstructs her. She argues with station chiefs. She lobbies CIA directors. She waits for satellite imagery from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. She competes with other analysts who have different theories. When the Abbottabad compound is identified, the decision to raid it passes through the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and ultimately the President. Maya is essential, but she is not sufficient. The system kills bin Laden. Maya merely points it in the right direction.

In Dhar’s telling, Hamza Ali Mazari accomplishes his mission through personal capability. Singh’s character does receive instructions from a handler, and there are scenes suggesting a larger intelligence apparatus behind his deployment. But the film’s dramatic weight rests entirely on Mazari’s individual prowess: his ability to fight, to deceive, to endure, to improvise. He infiltrates Karachi’s crime syndicates alone. He builds his cover identity alone. He navigates the treachery of Rehman Dakait, the gangster played by Akshaye Khanna, through personal cunning rather than institutional support. When Mazari succeeds, it is because he is extraordinary. When Maya succeeds, it is because the institution finally caught up to what she had been arguing for years.

This distinction produces radically different political implications. Zero Dark Thirty’s institutional framing distributes both credit and blame. The CIA’s enhanced interrogation program is presented as an institutional decision, not a personal vice. The decade-long delay in finding bin Laden is presented as an institutional failure, not an individual one. The ultimate success is institutional: SEAL Team Six executes a mission planned by military professionals using intelligence gathered by thousands of analysts. The film’s implicit argument is that American power operates through systems, and that those systems are capable of both terrible mistakes and remarkable achievements. The individual within the system matters, but the system matters more.

Dhurandhar’s personal framing concentrates both credit and blame on the individual operative. Mazari’s heroism is his own. His suffering is his own. His moral choices are his own. The state that sent him appears mostly as a distant authority that provides the mission but not the means. This framing removes the question of institutional accountability entirely. There is no Senate committee to investigate Mazari’s methods. There is no Inspector General to question whether the operation was legal. There is no press briefing at which a spokesperson must answer difficult questions. Mazari acts, succeeds, and the nation benefits. The institutional infrastructure that would complicate this clean narrative simply does not appear in the frame.

Hoffman’s analysis of how democratic states construct their counter-terrorism narratives is illuminating here. In his decades of studying both the American and Israeli counter-terrorism establishments, Hoffman has observed that democracies face a unique challenge: they must conduct covert operations that often violate the principles they claim to defend, and they must then construct narratives that reconcile the operation with the principles. America’s narrative tradition, shaped by decades of congressional oversight, investigative journalism, and a post-Watergate culture of institutional scrutiny, tends to produce narratives that acknowledge institutional complicity. India’s narrative tradition, shaped by an intelligence apparatus that operates without legislative oversight and a media culture that, particularly since the Pahalgam attack, has prioritized nationalist solidarity over investigative scrutiny, tends to produce narratives that celebrate individual heroism without examining institutional responsibility.

The comparison with the US drone program offers a parallel operational lens. America’s drone campaign in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia operated within a framework of presidential authorization, legal memoranda, and eventual public disclosure. India’s shadow war operates without any comparable framework. Zero Dark Thirty, a product of the first system, cannot avoid depicting the institutional apparatus even when depicting its failures. Dhurandhar, a product of the second system, naturally gravitates toward the lone hero precisely because there is no institutional narrative to tell.

The casting choices reinforce this divergence. Chastain’s Maya is deliberately unglamorous. She wears minimal makeup. Her hair is often pulled back or disheveled. Her office is a cubicle. Her triumph at the film’s conclusion is depicted not as a moment of glory but as a moment of exhaustion: she sits alone on a military transport plane, and when the loadmaster asks where she wants to go, she has no answer. She has spent her entire career on this one mission, and now that it is done, she does not know what she is. Singh’s Mazari, by contrast, is presented with the visual grammar of the action hero: composed, physically formidable, emotionally intense. His moments of vulnerability are carefully calibrated to enhance rather than diminish his heroic stature. When he breaks down, it is because the burden of being exceptional is heavy, not because the institution has failed him.

Both films surround their protagonists with supporting casts that mirror their respective institutional and personal orientations. Zero Dark Thirty surrounds Maya with a dozen named CIA officers, each with a distinct role in the institutional machinery: Dan the interrogator, Jessica the colleague, Joseph Bradley the station chief, George the senior analyst who becomes CIA Director. These characters function as parts of a machine. When one is removed (through death, transfer, or retirement), another takes their place, and the institution continues. The film’s ensemble structure argues that Maya is necessary but replaceable, and that the institution’s strength lies precisely in its ability to absorb the loss of individuals. Dhurandhar surrounds Mazari with a smaller cast that functions differently. Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait is not a cog in a machine but a mirror, a character whose charisma and ruthlessness reflect Mazari’s own qualities from a different moral angle. Sanjay Dutt, Arjun Rampal, and R. Madhavan inhabit roles that orbit Mazari rather than populate an institution. The supporting cast in Dhurandhar exists to enhance the protagonist’s journey, not to represent an institutional infrastructure.

The physical environments in which the two films unfold tell a parallel story. Zero Dark Thirty’s CIA stations are institutional spaces: government-issue furniture, secure communications equipment, classified document storage, fluorescent overhead lighting. These spaces look like what they are: offices where professional employees do professional work. The visual ordinariness of these spaces is Bigelow’s way of insisting that the covert war is not a romantic adventure but a job. Dhurandhar’s Karachi is rendered as a labyrinth of sensory extremes: narrow alleys lit by neon, crowded political rallies, waterfront warehouses where arms and drugs change hands under cover of darkness, palatial residences where the criminal elite live in opulence funded by terror. These spaces are visually extraordinary, and their extraordinariness serves the film’s mythological register. Mazari is not working in an office. He is descending into an underworld.

Bureaucratic Realism Against Heroic Mythology

Zero Dark Thirty is a film that loves paperwork. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal fill their film with the mundane infrastructure of intelligence work: analysts reviewing surveillance footage on government-issue monitors, case officers arguing over source reliability at cluttered conference tables, station chiefs managing budgets and personnel rosters. The Islamabad station looks like a particularly dingy office building. The CIA headquarters scenes feature fluorescent lighting, bad coffee, and middle managers who care more about their next posting than about catching bin Laden. Bigelow’s visual language insists that the war on terror is fought not in glamorous locations by glamorous people but in ugly offices by tired professionals who happen to have Top Secret clearances.

Bigelow reinforces this visual vocabulary through her camera work. She shoots many of the intelligence scenes with handheld cameras, creating a documentary texture that strips the covert war of its cinematic sheen. Conversations are captured in medium shots that emphasize the ordinariness of the speakers. The lighting in the Islamabad station reproduces the unflattering fluorescent glare of government facilities worldwide. Even when the film moves to more dramatic locations, the Afghan mountains where CIA officers meet informants or the streets of Islamabad where a car bomb detonates, Bigelow maintains the same documentary restraint, refusing to elevate the danger into spectacle. Her camera says: this is not an adventure. This is work, and the people doing it are workers.

This aesthetic commitment to bureaucratic realism serves a narrative purpose. By showing the audience the institutional plumbing of intelligence work, Bigelow demystifies the covert war and forces her audience to confront its banality. The torture scenes are effective not because they are graphic (by Hollywood standards, they are restrained) but because they are procedural. Dan, the interrogator played by Jason Clarke, approaches waterboarding the way a middle manager approaches a quarterly report: it is something that needs to be done, it is unpleasant, and he would rather be doing something else. The horror of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, as Bigelow presents it, is not that sadists ran it but that bureaucrats did. The system produced torture as a deliverable, and the system’s personnel implemented it the way they implemented everything else: competently, without enthusiasm, and with appropriate paperwork.

Dhurandhar operates in a different register entirely. Dhar’s visual language is operatic, kinetic, and saturated with the aesthetics of the heist film and the gangster epic. Karachi is rendered as a neon-lit labyrinth of narrow streets, underground gambling dens, political rallies, and waterfront warehouses where arms deals happen under cover of darkness. The intelligence work that Mazari conducts is presented not as bureaucratic analysis but as physical performance: infiltration, hand-to-hand combat, improvised deception, narrow escapes. Where Maya studies photographs and writes memos, Mazari fights, seduces, manipulates, and kills. Where Bigelow’s CIA is an office, Dhar’s RAW is a battlefield.

The mythological register is deliberate. As the broader analysis of Dhurandhar’s cultural function demonstrates, Dhar and his team were not attempting to make a realistic depiction of intelligence operations. They were constructing a national myth. The film’s three-hour runtime is structured not as a procedural investigation but as a hero’s journey: departure from the known world, descent into the underworld (literally, in the form of Karachi’s criminal underbelly), confrontation with the shadow (Rehman Dakait’s seductive power), and return with the prize of vengeance fulfilled. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is more useful for understanding Dhurandhar’s structure than any intelligence textbook.

Structurally, mythological cinema produces a specific relationship between the audience and the narrative. In a procedural film, the audience watches from outside: they observe the institution working, they evaluate its choices, they form judgments about its effectiveness and morality. In a mythological film, the audience is drawn inside: they identify with the hero, they share his trials, they experience his triumph as their own. Zero Dark Thirty positions its audience as observers of an institutional process. Dhurandhar positions its audience as participants in a heroic journey. The observer can critique. The participant can only ride. This is why Dhurandhar is more politically effective than Zero Dark Thirty as a narrative of national capability: it bypasses the critical faculties that democratic citizens use to evaluate their government’s actions and engages the mythological faculties that human beings use to find meaning in violence.

The relationship between mythological cinema and national identity operates differently in each cultural context. America has a long tradition of mythological cinema, from the Western to the superhero film, and Americans are accustomed to distinguishing between mythological entertainment and political reality. John Wayne’s war films did not prevent the anti-Vietnam War movement. Captain America films do not determine Pentagon procurement decisions. There is a cultural membrane between myth and policy that allows Americans to consume mythological cinema without necessarily endorsing the political positions implicit in the myth. India’s cultural membrane between myth and policy is thinner, partly because the traditions of epic storytelling that inform Bollywood have always been closer to political and religious life than Hollywood’s entertainment traditions, and partly because the political environment of post-Pahalgam India has deliberately blurred the line between patriotic entertainment and strategic communication.

The comparison illuminates what each country wants to believe about the nature of covert power. America, at least in the version Bigelow presents, wants to believe that its power is institutional: reliable, transferable, sustainable, and accountable. When one analyst retires, another takes her place. When one president leaves office, the next inherits the intelligence apparatus. Power resides in the institution, not the individual. India, at least in the version Dhar presents, wants to believe that its power is personal: extraordinary individuals accomplishing extraordinary things through personal capability. When the institution fails, which it does routinely in Dhurandhar’s telling, the hero compensates through sheer will. Power resides in the individual, not the institution.

Sharma’s framework for understanding how Indian popular culture constructs political reality is essential here. In his analysis of how Hindu nationalism moved from intellectual project to mass political movement, Sharma traces the role of cultural products, from novels to films to television serials, in translating abstract ideological commitments into visceral emotional experiences. Dhurandhar performs exactly this function for the shadow war. The abstract proposition that India should conduct covert operations on Pakistani soil becomes, through Dhar’s mythological register, a visceral emotional experience of watching a hero do what needs to be done. The proposition does not need to be argued. It needs to be felt. And Dhar ensures it is felt.

Bigelow, by contrast, resists the mythological register at every turn. Her film is deliberately anti-mythological. The Abbottabad raid, which could have been presented as a triumphant set piece, is instead presented as a confused, frightening, methodical house-clearing operation conducted by heavily armed men using night-vision goggles in a residential compound where women and children are screaming. The moment of bin Laden’s death is almost anticlimactic: a SEAL fires into a dark room, reports that he has a possible jackpot, and the confirmation process begins. There is no swelling soundtrack. There is no heroic close-up. There is a dead body on a floor and a group of professionals who need to confirm the identity, gather intelligence materials, and extract before Pakistani military forces respond.

The anti-mythological approach of Zero Dark Thirty produced a cultural backlash in America. Critics who wanted the film to be more explicitly condemnatory of torture accused Bigelow of normalizing it through her procedural realism. Critics who wanted the film to celebrate the SEAL team’s achievement accused Bigelow of robbing the raid of its heroic dimension. Bigelow occupied an uncomfortable middle ground: too realistic for those who wanted myth, too cinematic for those who wanted journalism. Dhurandhar faced a different backlash, from critics like Uday Bhatia of Mint, who described the film as propaganda designed to flatter ruling political leadership, and from Siddhant Adlakha of IGN, who noted its precarious balance between entertainment and hateful messaging. But Dhurandhar’s audience did not punish it for mythologizing. It rewarded it. The film’s earnings exceeded 1,350 crore rupees worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Indian release of 2025 and the third highest-grossing Hindi film in history.

Acknowledging Moral Cost Against Denying It

Zero Dark Thirty’s most controversial creative decision was placing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program at the beginning of the film and making it an inescapable part of the narrative. The first significant sequence after the September 11 audio involves Dan waterboarding a detainee named Ammar at a CIA black site. The scene is extended, uncomfortable, and deliberately clinical. Maya watches, initially shaken, and over time becomes inured. The film does not editorialize. Bigelow does not insert a character who objects on moral grounds (at least not in the opening sequences). She presents the torture as something that happened, shows its effects on both the detainee and the perpetrators, and leaves the audience to make their own judgment.

This creative choice produced one of the most heated cultural debates in American film history. Three sitting senators, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain, wrote to the head of Sony Pictures arguing that the film was misleading because it implied that enhanced interrogation techniques produced the intelligence lead that identified bin Laden’s courier. Acting CIA Director Michael Morell released a statement clarifying that the film took artistic license. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker accused Bigelow of exploiting the torture program for dramatic effect. Naomi Wolf compared Bigelow to Leni Riefenstahl. Bigelow herself responded that she believed bin Laden was found through detective work, not torture, but that the torture happened and could not be ignored.

The debate itself is the point. America’s covert war film produced a national argument about the morality of the methods used to fight the covert war. The film’s ambiguity, its refusal to tell the audience whether the torture worked or whether it was justified, forced Americans to confront the question themselves. This is what moral complexity looks like in cinema: not a character delivering a speech about ethics but a narrative structure that refuses to resolve the ethical question for the audience.

Dhurandhar takes the opposite approach. Moral cost is present in the film, but it is assigned entirely to the enemy. The ISI-underworld nexus that Mazari infiltrates is depicted as morally monstrous: it kills innocents, it funds terrorism, it corrupts Pakistani politics, it threatens India’s sovereignty. Mazari’s violence against this network is presented as corrective, surgical, and just. When Mazari kills, the audience is positioned to experience the killing as deserved. When Mazari suffers, the audience is positioned to experience his suffering as the unjust cost of righteous work. The film does not ask whether India should be conducting covert operations in Karachi. It asks only whether Mazari can survive the personal toll of doing what must be done.

The absence of moral interrogation in Dhurandhar is not an oversight. It is a structural choice that reflects India’s current political-cultural moment. The debate around Dhurandhar and nationalism has been extensive, with critics noting that the film arrived during a period of intense nationalist sentiment following the Pahalgam massacre and the shadow war’s acceleration. In that context, a film that questioned the morality of covert operations on Pakistani soil would have been commercially suicidal and culturally unthinkable. Dhurandhar’s moral clarity is a commercial and political calculation, and a successful one.

The comparison reveals a significant difference in how the two democracies process state violence at the cultural level. America, thirteen years after September 11 and two years after the Abbottabad raid, had sufficient temporal and emotional distance to produce a film that interrogated its own methods. India, still in the midst of the shadow war and freshly traumatized by Pahalgam, had neither the temporal distance nor the political space for such interrogation. This is not a judgment about which country is morally superior. It is an observation about the relationship between trauma, time, and the capacity for self-examination. Munich, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film about Israel’s response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, was released thirty-three years after the events it depicted. Even Israel, a country with far more experience in targeted killings than India, needed three decades before it could produce a film that questioned the psychological cost of state-sanctioned assassination. The parallel between Munich and Dhurandhar suggests that India may eventually produce its own self-interrogating covert war film, but that film will not arrive until the shadow war is either concluded or far enough in the past that its participants can be examined without the protective instinct of national solidarity.

Bigelow herself addressed this temporal dimension in her response to critics. In a statement published in the Los Angeles Times, she argued that depicting torture did not constitute endorsing it, and that she was a lifelong pacifist who believed bin Laden was found through detective work rather than coercion. Her statement implicitly acknowledged the moral cost of what her film depicted. Dhar has made no comparable public statement about the moral dimensions of Dhurandhar’s violence. The difference is telling. Bigelow felt compelled to position herself morally relative to her film’s content. Dhar apparently felt no such compulsion, because the cultural environment in which Dhurandhar exists does not demand such positioning.

The critical infrastructure surrounding each film further reveals the moral-cost asymmetry. In America, Zero Dark Thirty generated a secondary literature of reviews, op-eds, academic articles, and congressional inquiries that dissected the film’s treatment of torture in granular detail. The New Yorker published multiple pieces. The Atlantic engaged. Political scientists at Georgetown and Harvard assigned the film in their courses. This critical infrastructure exists because American culture maintains, however imperfectly, a tradition of institutional self-examination that extends to cultural production about national security. In India, Dhurandhar generated passionate debates on social media and in film columns, but the debates were primarily about whether the film was entertaining versus propagandistic, not about whether the covert operations it depicted were morally justified. The critical infrastructure for examining moral cost in national security cinema is still developing in India, and its underdevelopment is both a cause and a consequence of films like Dhurandhar that decline to engage the question.

Sharma’s work on how cultural production shapes political consciousness illuminates why this matters beyond the realm of film criticism. When a democracy produces a covert war film that engages moral cost, it strengthens the cultural muscles required for democratic accountability: citizens practice evaluating their government’s actions, weighing costs against benefits, and forming judgments about the legitimacy of state violence. When a democracy produces a covert war film that denies moral cost, it atrophies those muscles: citizens consume a narrative that tells them the hard questions have already been answered and the answers are clear. Over time, the cumulative effect of moral-cost cinema versus moral-clarity cinema shapes a society’s capacity for the self-examination that democratic governance requires.

The treatment of the enemy further illustrates the divergence. Zero Dark Thirty’s detainees are presented as human beings. Ammar, the primary detainee in the opening sequences, is shown suffering, breaking, and eventually providing information under duress. His humanity is not sentimentalized, but it is acknowledged. The film’s depiction of the Abbottabad compound includes women and children who are terrified, confused, and caught in the violence. Bin Laden himself, when he appears, is a frail, elderly man shot in a dark hallway. Bigelow strips the enemy of both monstrosity and grandeur, presenting him as a human target rather than an existential evil.

This humanization of the enemy is one of Zero Dark Thirty’s most radical artistic choices, and one of the least appreciated. By showing bin Laden as a thin, bearded man living in a cramped third-floor room rather than as a commanding figure orchestrating global jihad from a mountain fortress, Bigelow deconstructs the mythology that sustained the War on Terror for a decade. The man America spent trillions of dollars hunting was hiding in a suburban house in Abbottabad, watching television, separated from his organization, and largely irrelevant to the operational activities of al-Qaeda affiliates around the world. The banality of his final residence is an implicit critique of the hunt itself: was this target worth the cost? Bigelow does not answer the question, but she makes it impossible not to ask.

Dhurandhar’s antagonists are drawn in bolder strokes. Rehman Dakait, Khanna’s character, is a charismatic gangster with political ambitions, a man whose charm makes him dangerous and whose violence makes him monstrous. The ISI figures who appear in the film are depicted as cynical manipulators who deploy terrorism as an instrument of state policy. The film’s Pakistani characters are not without complexity, Khanna’s performance earned particular critical praise for its layered menace, but they serve the narrative function of justifying Mazari’s violence rather than complicating it. The enemy in Dhurandhar is worthy of destruction. The enemy in Zero Dark Thirty is merely a target.

The distinction in enemy portrayal connects to a broader pattern in how each country’s cinema has handled adversaries in national security films. American cinema, particularly since the Vietnam era, has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for depicting the enemy as human. From The Deer Hunter to Black Hawk Down to American Sniper, the tradition has moved, unevenly, toward acknowledging the humanity of those on the other side of the gun. Indian cinema, particularly in its national security subgenre, is at an earlier stage of this development. The Bollywood tradition of depicting Pakistani adversaries has historically alternated between cartoonish villainy (the ISI colonel who twirls his mustache) and invisible menace (the shadowy force that funds terrorism). Dhurandhar improves on this tradition, Khanna’s Rehman Dakait is a genuinely compelling antagonist, but it does not yet reach the point of inviting the audience to see the world through the adversary’s eyes. That invitation, when it eventually comes, will signal a new phase in India’s cultural processing of the shadow war.

Female Protagonist Against Male Protagonist

Maya and Mazari are constructed from fundamentally different gendered archetypes, and those archetypes reveal different assumptions about what covert power looks like, who wields it, and what it costs.

Jessica Chastain’s Maya is, in the context of the CIA spy thriller, a radical character. She is not a femme fatale. She is not a love interest. She is not a victim who must be rescued. She is an intelligence analyst: cerebral, obsessive, socially isolated, and professionally brilliant. Her power comes entirely from her mind. She reads cables, analyzes surveillance data, identifies patterns that others miss, and argues her case through the institutional channels available to her. She does not carry a weapon in the field. She does not engage in hand-to-hand combat. She does not seduce anyone for information. Her tradecraft is bureaucratic: she writes memos, she briefs superiors, she marshals evidence. When she finally confronts the CIA director, played by James Gandolfini, she does so across a conference table, not across a battlefield.

Maya’s gender is not incidental to the film’s meaning. Bigelow, the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director (for The Hurt Locker), chose to tell America’s most masculine counter-terrorism story through a female perspective. The choice reframes the entire narrative. Maya’s isolation within the CIA is partly professional (she is right when others are wrong) and partly gendered (she operates in a world of male station chiefs, male case officers, and male SEAL operators who regard her with a mixture of respect and condescension). Her triumph is the triumph of analytical intelligence over brute force, of persistence over aggression, of the person who reads the files over the person who kicks down the door.

Ranveer Singh’s Mazari operates in a different gendered tradition entirely. He is the mythological warrior: physically powerful, emotionally intense, willing to suffer and to inflict suffering in the service of a righteous cause. His power comes from his body and his will. He fights. He infiltrates. He survives beatings, betrayals, and moral isolation through physical toughness and psychological resilience. His sexuality is part of his cover: he must perform masculinity convincingly to survive in Karachi’s hypermasculine criminal underworld. Where Maya’s cerebral power challenges the gendered assumptions of the spy genre, Mazari’s physical power confirms them. He is Bond, he is Bourne, he is the archetypal action hero, transplanted into an Indian context and given an Indian cause.

The protagonist choice shapes the audience’s relationship to the covert war. Watching Maya, the audience is invited into a cerebral experience: they follow her analysis, track her reasoning, share her frustration when the institution does not listen. Watching Mazari, the audience is invited into a visceral experience: they feel his pain, share his rage, experience the adrenaline of his fights. Cerebral identification produces critical distance. Visceral identification produces emotional immersion. Critical distance allows for moral interrogation. Emotional immersion inhibits it.

This is not to say that Dhurandhar is a thoughtless film or that Mazari is a flat character. Singh’s performance, which multiple critics praised for its subdued intensity, brings vulnerability to the role. There are moments when Mazari’s isolation becomes genuinely painful, when the cost of his double life registers on screen with emotional authenticity. But these moments serve to deepen the audience’s identification with the hero rather than to question the mission itself. Mazari’s suffering ennobles him. It does not indict the system that sent him.

The gendered distinction connects to a broader cultural difference in how India and America construct the agent of state violence. In American political culture, the shift from masculine to feminine framing has accompanied a broader shift from celebrating state violence to interrogating it. The classic American war film of the 1940s and 1950s featured male heroes who embodied the righteous violence of the state. The revisionist war films of the 1970s and 1980s (Apocalypse Now, Platoon) introduced male protagonists who were damaged by the violence they perpetrated. Zero Dark Thirty takes the next step: the protagonist is female, and her relationship to violence is entirely mediated by institutional processes rather than personal aggression. The trajectory is one of increasing critical distance.

Indian cinema’s trajectory is moving in the opposite direction. The evolution from victim cinema to aggressor cinema has been accompanied by an intensification of masculine heroism rather than a questioning of it. From the frustrated civilian of A Wednesday through the reactive operatives of Baby and Phantom to the triumphant warrior of Dhurandhar, the Indian counter-terrorism film has moved steadily toward a protagonist who embodies the righteous violence of the state without questioning it. The trajectory is one of decreasing critical distance.

The gendered analysis extends to how each film constructs the space in which the protagonist operates. Maya operates in a professional workspace that is coded as gender-neutral in theory but male-dominated in practice. Her struggles include not only the analytical challenge of finding bin Laden but the professional challenge of being heard in rooms full of men who outrank her and who often dismiss her conclusions. Her persistence is coded as both professional and gendered: she is fighting the enemy and the institution simultaneously. Mazari operates in a space that is coded as exclusively masculine. Karachi’s criminal underworld, as Dhar depicts it, is a world of men where power is expressed through violence, loyalty, and dominance. Mazari’s infiltration requires him to perform a particular version of masculinity convincingly enough to be accepted by men who would kill him if his cover failed. His struggle is physical and psychological, but it is not gendered in the way Maya’s is. He does not fight the institution. He fights the enemy.

This gendered divergence produces different models of heroism for each film’s audience to internalize. Zero Dark Thirty’s model suggests that the most important form of courage in a covert war is intellectual and institutional: the courage to be right when everyone else is wrong, to persist when the system says stop, to value accuracy over authority. Dhurandhar’s model suggests that the most important form of courage is physical and moral: the courage to enter enemy territory alone, to endure suffering without breaking, to act decisively when the moment demands it. Both models are culturally contingent. Both reflect the values their respective societies prioritize. And both, crucially, shape how citizens evaluate the real covert operations their governments conduct: Americans ask whether the intelligence was right; Indians ask whether Mazari was brave enough.

Political Accountability Against Political Deniability

Zero Dark Thirty depicts a covert war that operates within a framework of political accountability, however imperfect. The film includes scenes of congressional briefings, presidential decision-making, and interagency coordination. The decision to launch the Abbottabad raid is shown as a political decision: Leon Panetta, the CIA Director, must argue the case to the White House; the President must weigh the risks of a unilateral military operation on Pakistani soil against the risk of letting bin Laden escape again. The film does not depict these accountability mechanisms as effective or admirable. It shows a system that is slow, politicized, and often wrong. But it shows a system. The audience understands that the covert war operates within a political structure that, at least in theory, can be held accountable.

Dhurandhar depicts a covert war that operates outside any comparable framework. Mazari receives his mission from a handler, but the chain of command above the handler disappears into fog. There is no scene in which a political leader authorizes the operation. There is no scene in which the operation’s legality is discussed. There is no scene in which anyone asks whether infiltrating a foreign country’s criminal underworld, assassinating its citizens, and disrupting its political structures might violate international law, Indian law, or basic norms of state behavior. The political infrastructure of deniability is so complete that it does not need to be depicted: it is the absence that defines the film’s political universe.

This divergence reflects a genuine structural difference between American and Indian covert operations. The CIA operates under statutory authority (the National Security Act of 1947, as amended), with congressional oversight (the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), and within a legal framework that includes presidential findings, covert action authorities, and Inspector General reviews. RAW operates under executive authority with no comparable statutory framework, no legislative oversight, and no independent review mechanism. Zero Dark Thirty could depict political accountability because political accountability exists in the American system, even when it fails. Dhurandhar could not depict political accountability because political accountability does not exist in the Indian system for covert operations.

The structural difference has shaped the evolution of both covert war cinemas in ways that extend beyond the two films under comparison. American intelligence cinema, from Three Days of the Condor through Syriana to Zero Dark Thirty, has consistently depicted the tension between operational effectiveness and democratic accountability as a central dramatic conflict. Characters in American spy films routinely struggle with the question of who authorized their mission, whether the authorization was lawful, and what happens when the mission goes wrong. This dramatic tradition exists because the institutional framework for accountability exists: filmmakers can depict oversight mechanisms failing or being circumvented because audiences understand that those mechanisms are supposed to work. Indian intelligence cinema has no comparable dramatic tradition because the institutional framework for accountability does not exist. Bollywood spy films, from Tiger Zinda Hai to Raazi to Dhurandhar, have tended to depict intelligence agents as extensions of national will rather than as agents of accountable institutions. Dramatic conflict pits the hero against the enemy, not the hero against the system. This is not a failure of imagination on the part of Indian filmmakers. It is a reflection of institutional reality.

Each film’s political reception further illustrates the divergence. Zero Dark Thirty prompted formal political responses: senators wrote public letters, the CIA issued statements, the Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned a report on the film’s accuracy regarding torture. The political system treated the film as a political event that required institutional engagement. Dhurandhar prompted a different kind of political response: the film was banned in Pakistan and several Gulf states, celebrated by ruling-party supporters in India, and criticized by opposition voices as propaganda. But there was no institutional engagement comparable to what Zero Dark Thirty received. No parliamentary committee examined whether the film’s depiction of covert operations was accurate. No intelligence official issued a public statement about the film’s relationship to reality. The political system treated the film as entertainment, even though its political implications were profound.

The government cooperation allegations surrounding both films add another layer to the comparison. Bigelow and Boal were accused of receiving privileged access to CIA information for their screenplay. The CIA’s entertainment liaison office confirmed that it had engaged with the filmmakers, and the extent of that engagement became a matter of public debate and congressional inquiry. Dhurandhar faced parallel speculation: the parents of Major Mohit Sharma, a real Indian intelligence operative who died in 2009 after a mission similar to the one depicted in the film, filed a petition in the Delhi High Court arguing that their son’s story was being used without consent. Director Dhar denied basing the character on any single individual. The petition was unsuccessful, and Dhurandhar released on schedule. But where the American debate about government cooperation with Zero Dark Thirty produced a public accounting of the relationship between the intelligence community and the entertainment industry, the Indian debate about government cooperation with Dhurandhar produced no comparable accounting.

Deniability extends to how each film handles the question of success and failure. Zero Dark Thirty acknowledges failure explicitly. The film depicts the 2009 Camp Chapman attack in Afghanistan, in which a Jordanian triple agent killed seven CIA officers in a suicide bombing. The scene is devastating: Jennifer Ehle, who plays Maya’s friend and fellow analyst Jessica, is among the dead. The attack is presented as a catastrophic intelligence failure that resulted directly from the CIA’s desperation to find bin Laden. The institution’s mistakes kill its own people. Bigelow insists that the audience see the cost of failure alongside the triumph of success.

The Camp Chapman sequence serves a structural function beyond its emotional impact. By placing a catastrophic failure in the middle of the film’s narrative arc, Bigelow forces her audience to confront the reality that intelligence operations produce casualties among those who conduct them, not only among their targets. The death of Jessica introduces an element of genuine grief into a narrative that could otherwise be read as a cold procedural exercise. Maya’s response to Jessica’s death, a hardening of resolve that transforms her from a committed analyst into an obsessive one, mirrors the broader American response to casualties in the War on Terror: grief channeled into determination, with the question of whether the underlying strategy is sound deferred indefinitely.

Dhurandhar handles failure differently. Mazari faces setbacks, betrayals, and near-death experiences, but these are presented as obstacles for the hero to overcome rather than as institutional failures to examine. When things go wrong, it is because enemies are cunning or circumstances are treacherous, not because the intelligence apparatus made a strategic error. Mazari can fail. The mission cannot be questioned. This framing insulates the covert war itself from criticism: if the operation goes wrong, the fault lies with luck or the enemy, never with the decision to launch the operation in the first place.

The accountability gap extends to how each film handles civilian casualties. Zero Dark Thirty does not flinch from depicting the cost of the covert war to non-combatants. The Camp Chapman attack kills CIA officers, but the film also includes scenes of Pakistani civilians caught in the violence of operations conducted on their soil. The Abbottabad raid sequence shows women and children in the compound, terrified and traumatized by the incursion. Bigelow does not dwell on these moments, but she includes them, and their presence complicates the audience’s ability to consume the raid as pure triumph. Dhurandhar’s civilian casualties, to the extent they appear, are casualties inflicted by the enemy rather than by Mazari or the Indian intelligence apparatus. The ISI-underworld nexus kills innocents. Mazari kills those who kill innocents. The moral accounting is clean, and its cleanliness is part of the myth.

The Mythology Question

Adjudicating the named disagreement that this analysis must resolve requires is whether Zero Dark Thirty is genuinely more honest than Dhurandhar because it acknowledges torture and moral cost, or whether it is equally mythological in a different register.

The case for Zero Dark Thirty’s greater honesty is straightforward. The film depicts torture. It shows institutional failure. It acknowledges moral cost. It refuses to resolve the ethical questions it raises. It presents the enemy as human. It denies its audience the catharsis of triumphant heroism. These are the markers of a film that is grappling with uncomfortable truths rather than constructing comfortable myths.

A subtler but equally compelling case can be made for Zero Dark Thirty’s equal mythology. Bigelow’s film, for all its procedural realism, constructs its own form of mythological justification. By centering the narrative on Maya’s decade-long obsession, the film implicitly argues that the hunt for bin Laden was driven by a pure analytical conviction rather than by the political calculations, bureaucratic incentives, and institutional momentum that actually shaped the program. By depicting the Abbottabad raid as the culmination of one woman’s lonely crusade, the film romanticizes the intelligence process even as it demystifies the operational details. By ending with Maya alone on a military transport, the film constructs a mythology of the heroic individual within the institution, even as it claims to be telling an institutional story.

The film also mythologizes through omission. Zero Dark Thirty does not depict the drone program that killed thousands of people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia during the same period covered by the film. It does not depict the diplomatic consequences of the Abbottabad raid for US-Pakistan relations. It does not depict the CIA’s collaboration with Pakistani intelligence services that continued even as those services harbored bin Laden. By focusing exclusively on the hunt and the kill, Bigelow constructs a narrative of clean resolution that the actual War on Terror, with its ongoing drone campaigns, its expanding surveillance state, and its indefinite detention regime, does not support.

Adjudication, then, yields this conclusion: Zero Dark Thirty is more honest in its willingness to depict the methods of the covert war, including its ugliest methods. But it is equally mythological in its narrative structure, which presents the hunt for bin Laden as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, when the actual covert war had no such clean arc. Dhurandhar is more mythological in its refusal to depict moral cost, but it is more honest in one respect that is rarely acknowledged: it does not pretend that the covert war will end. Mazari’s mission continues. The shadow war continues. There is no final raid, no closing scene, no definitive resolution. Dhurandhar, for all its heroic mythology, at least acknowledges that the problem it depicts is ongoing.

Both films are mythological. They construct different myths for different national needs. America in 2012 needed a myth of closure: we found him, we killed him, and it cost us something. India in 2025 needed a myth of capability: we can reach them, we can hurt them, and we are not finished. Neither myth is true. Neither is entirely false. Both serve the political functions that their respective cultures require at this particular historical moment.

The mythology question has practical consequences beyond cinema. When American policymakers debated the future of the CIA’s drone program, the enhanced interrogation program, and the broader War on Terror strategy, they did so within a cultural environment shaped in part by Zero Dark Thirty’s narrative of institutional accountability and moral cost. The film did not determine policy outcomes, but it contributed to a cultural vocabulary in which moral cost was a legitimate category of analysis. When Indian policymakers operate within the framework of the shadow war, they do so within a cultural environment shaped in part by Dhurandhar’s narrative of heroic capability and righteous action. Dhurandhar does not determine India’s covert operations policy, but it contributes to a cultural vocabulary in which questioning the shadow war’s moral legitimacy is tantamount to questioning the national interest.

Each film’s mythological register also shapes international perception. Zero Dark Thirty was consumed globally as a window into America’s self-understanding, and its willingness to depict torture and institutional failure was read by international audiences as evidence of American democratic resilience, the capacity for self-criticism even about the most difficult operations. Dhurandhar was consumed regionally, primarily by Indian and South Asian audiences, as a statement of Indian capability and resolve. Its refusal to engage moral complexity was read by Pakistani commentators as confirmation of Indian aggressive intent, and by Indian supporters as confirmation that India had finally found its strategic voice. Each film serves as a diplomatic communication, intended or not, that tells the world what each country believes about itself and what it wants the world to believe.

Government Cooperation and Competing Political Narratives

The question of how closely each film’s production team worked with intelligence agencies illuminates a broader pattern in how democracies manage the relationship between cultural production and covert operations.

Zero Dark Thirty’s production involved documented interactions between Bigelow, Boal, and the CIA. The agency’s entertainment liaison office facilitated meetings with officials involved in the bin Laden hunt. Congressional scrutiny of these interactions, led by Senator Feinstein’s Intelligence Committee, produced a public record of what was shared and what was not. The Department of Defense’s Inspector General examined whether classified information had been improperly disclosed. The findings were mixed: the CIA had provided access beyond what would normally be granted to filmmakers, but there was no evidence that classified operational details had been compromised. The controversy produced a lasting debate about the appropriate relationship between the intelligence community and Hollywood, a debate that continues to inform how the CIA engages with entertainment productions.

Dhurandhar’s production involved no comparable public scrutiny of its relationship with Indian intelligence agencies. Director Dhar, who previously directed Uri: The Surgical Strike, a film about the 2016 Indian military response to the Uri attack, has spoken publicly about conducting extensive research for his films. Singh reportedly spent months preparing for the role, including physical training and accent work for his portrayal of a man living under cover in Karachi. The film’s attention to operational detail, from its depiction of Karachi’s geography to its rendering of ISI-underworld dynamics, suggests significant research access. But unlike the American case, there has been no institutional inquiry into what access was provided, by whom, or under what conditions.

The asymmetry in scrutiny reflects the asymmetry in institutional accountability discussed above. It also reflects a difference in how the two political systems manage the cultural production of covert war narratives. America’s system, for all its flaws, treats the cultural production of intelligence narratives as a matter of public interest subject to institutional oversight. India’s system treats it as a private creative enterprise that falls outside the scope of governmental accountability, even when the creative enterprise draws on classified or semi-classified information to construct narratives that serve the government’s strategic communication objectives.

The asymmetry has historical roots. America’s post-Watergate, post-Church Committee political culture established the principle that intelligence activities, including their cultural representations, are subject to democratic scrutiny. When a film claims to tell the story of a real intelligence operation, the American political system activates institutional mechanisms to assess the film’s accuracy, to examine whether classified information was compromised, and to debate the policy implications of the narrative being constructed. This system is imperfect: it is slow, it is often politicized, and it rarely produces definitive conclusions. But it exists, and its existence shapes how films about intelligence are produced, consumed, and debated.

India’s post-independence political culture established a different principle: intelligence operations are matters of national security that exist outside the scope of democratic deliberation. RAW, founded in 1968, has operated without a legislative charter comparable to the CIA’s statutory authority. Parliamentary questions about intelligence operations are routinely deflected on national security grounds. Investigative journalism about Indian intelligence activities faces legal and extra-legal obstacles that have no American equivalent. In this environment, a film about intelligence operations is not treated as a text that requires institutional scrutiny but as an entertainment product that exists in a separate category from the operations it depicts. The irony is that Dhurandhar may be closer to operational reality than Zero Dark Thirty in some respects, precisely because no institutional mechanism exists to assess the gap between film and reality.

Both films became politically significant beyond their cinematic merits. Zero Dark Thirty arrived during President Obama’s reelection campaign, and Republicans accused the administration of providing the filmmakers with access in order to produce a film that would burnish Obama’s national security credentials before the election. (The film was originally scheduled for an October 2012 release but was moved to December, allegedly to avoid the appearance of political coordination.) Dhurandhar arrived during a period of intense national security discourse in India, following the Pahalgam attack and the escalation toward Operation Sindoor. The film’s release on December 5, 2025, placed it squarely in the middle of a national conversation about whether India should be doing more to strike at the sources of terrorism on Pakistani soil. Whether or not the timing was politically calculated, the political effect was undeniable: Dhurandhar provided a cinematic answer to the question the nation was asking.

The commercial strategies of both films illuminate how each entertainment industry understood the market for covert war cinema. Zero Dark Thirty was independently financed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures and distributed by Sony’s Columbia Pictures label. The film’s marketing emphasized its critical credentials: Bigelow’s reputation, Chastain’s performance, the film’s Oscar potential. The audience was positioned as discerning viewers engaging with serious cinema. Dhurandhar was produced under the Jio Studios and B62 Studios banners and marketed as a mass entertainer: Ranveer Singh’s star power, Shashwat Sachdev’s pounding soundtrack, the spectacle of Karachi’s underworld rendered in IMAX-ready cinematography. The audience was positioned as participants in a national event. The marketing approaches reflect different assumptions about who watches covert war cinema and why: in America, a self-selected audience of politically engaged adults; in India, the broadest possible national audience hungry for a narrative of capability.

A box office comparison tells its own story about what each nation’s audience wanted from its covert war film. Zero Dark Thirty earned approximately $132 million worldwide, a strong performance for a serious, adult-oriented thriller but not a blockbuster by Hollywood standards. The film was a critical triumph, nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, but its audience was self-selected: people who wanted to grapple with difficult questions about America’s covert war. Dhurandhar earned approximately $140 million worldwide (at 2025 exchange rates), a staggering performance for an Indian film. Its audience was not self-selected; it was broad, enthusiastic, and hungry for the narrative of capability and vengeance that the film provided. India wanted mythology. America, at least in 2012, was willing to accept something more ambiguous.

What the Comparison Reveals

The five-dimension comparison between Zero Dark Thirty and Dhurandhar reveals not what each country does but what each country wants to believe about what it does. America wants to believe that its covert war is institutional, procedurally legitimate, morally costly but ultimately necessary, conducted by dedicated professionals within an accountable system, and capable of definitive resolution. India wants to believe that its covert war is heroic, personally embodied, morally righteous, conducted by extraordinary individuals who compensate for institutional weakness, and ongoing because the threat is ongoing.

Neither self-image is accurate. America’s covert war is not as institutionally accountable as Zero Dark Thirty suggests. The drone program operated for years with minimal congressional oversight. The CIA’s enhanced interrogation program was authorized through secret legal memoranda that circumvented normal review processes. The Abbottabad raid was conducted unilaterally on Pakistani soil without the knowledge or consent of Pakistan’s government, an act that, regardless of its operational success, violated the sovereignty of a nominal ally. Bigelow’s film, for all its procedural realism, sanitizes the institutional accountability question by focusing on a single operation that succeeded rather than on the broader patterns of institutional failure that characterized much of the War on Terror.

India’s covert war is not as personally heroic as Dhurandhar suggests. The shadow war documented throughout this series is not the work of lone operatives infiltrating enemy territory. It is the work of intelligence networks, local assets, strategic partnerships, and institutional capabilities that have been built over decades. The motorcycle-borne assassins who eliminate targets in Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi are not operating alone. They are the visible tip of an intelligence infrastructure that includes signals intelligence, human intelligence, financial tracking, and diplomatic cover. Dhar’s film, by focusing on the lone hero, obscures the institutional reality just as effectively as Bigelow’s film, by focusing on institutional process, obscures the personal costs borne by individual operatives.

The films also reveal different stages in each country’s processing of state-sanctioned violence. America in 2012 was in a period of reckoning. The War on Terror was widely perceived as having produced strategic failure (the Iraq War), institutional corruption (the torture program), and moral compromise (indefinite detention, targeted killing of American citizens). Zero Dark Thirty arrived as part of a broader cultural effort to assess what the country had done and what it had cost. The Abbottabad raid was the one clear success in a decade of ambiguous outcomes, and Bigelow’s film used that success as a frame for examining the full cost of the campaign that produced it.

India in 2025 was in a period of assertion. The shadow war was producing tangible results: high-value targets eliminated, terror organizations disrupted, a credible deterrent established against future attacks on Indian soil. The Pahalgam massacre and Operation Sindoor had crystallized a national consensus that India should be more aggressive, not less, in responding to terrorism originating from Pakistani soil. Dhurandhar arrived as part of a cultural infrastructure that was manufacturing, in Sharma’s term, consent for an ongoing and escalating campaign. Reckoning is a luxury of distance. Assertion is a product of proximity. India has not yet reached the stage where a film like Zero Dark Thirty, much less a film like Munich, is culturally possible.

The temporal dimension raises a question that the comparison cannot fully answer but must pose: what will India’s covert war cinema look like in twenty years? If the pattern from other democracies holds, the assertion phase will eventually give way to a reckoning phase, and the reckoning will produce films that ask the questions Dhurandhar refuses to ask. Who authorized these operations? Were they legal? Did they achieve their strategic objectives? What did they cost in lives, in diplomatic capital, in national character? These questions are not being asked now because the shadow war is ongoing and the national mood does not permit them. They will be asked eventually because democracies, however imperfectly, eventually hold their governments accountable for the violence conducted in their name. The films that ask these questions will be India’s version of Munich, and they will be possible only when the shadow war has receded far enough into the past that examining it feels like analysis rather than betrayal.

The comparison ultimately forces a question that neither film can answer: what is the relationship between the story a democracy tells about its covert war and the covert war itself? Hoffman’s research suggests that the narrative and the operation are more closely linked than most analysts acknowledge. The stories nations tell about their covert wars shape public expectations, which shape political constraints, which shape operational parameters. Zero Dark Thirty, by depicting the covert war as morally costly, contributed to a political environment in which moral cost was a legitimate dimension of the policy debate. Dhurandhar, by depicting the covert war as morally righteous, contributes to a political environment in which moral cost is not a relevant consideration. Both films are participants in the covert wars they depict. Both shape the political conditions under which those wars continue.

Hoffman’s framework for the narrative-operation feedback loop is worth elaborating because it applies with particular force to the India-America comparison. In the American case, the feedback loop operated as a constraining force: Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture contributed to public pressure that eventually led to executive orders restricting enhanced interrogation techniques. The film did not cause the policy change, but it participated in the cultural environment that made the policy change possible. In the Indian case, the feedback loop operates as an enabling force: Dhurandhar’s depiction of covert operations as heroic and justified contributes to public support for the shadow war’s continuation and escalation. The film does not cause the operational decisions, but it participates in the cultural environment that makes those decisions politically cost-free. The constraining feedback loop produces cautious covert operations. The enabling feedback loop produces aggressive ones. Both democracies are living with the consequences of the stories they chose to tell.

Both films will be studied, long after their box office receipts are forgotten, as evidence of what two democracies believed about themselves at the moment when they were doing the most difficult things democracies are asked to do.

The cinematic comparison also reveals something about the audiences themselves. American audiences who watched Zero Dark Thirty in January 2013 brought to the theater a decade of ambivalence about the War on Terror, shaped by Abu Ghraib photographs, Guantanamo controversies, WikiLeaks disclosures, and a steady drip of reporting about drone strikes that killed civilians along with combatants. They were primed for a film that acknowledged complexity because their lived experience of the war had been complex. Indian audiences who watched Dhurandhar in December 2025 brought to the theater the immediate rage of the Pahalgam massacre, the catharsis of Operation Sindoor, and the accumulating satisfaction of the shadow war’s growing body count. They were primed for a film that affirmed righteousness because their lived experience of the moment was one of justified anger. Neither audience was wrong about what it wanted. Both audiences got what they needed. And both were shaped by what they received.

The larger pattern across the InsightCrunch Dhurandhar Decoded series confirms what this comparison demonstrates: Dhurandhar is not merely a film about India’s shadow war. It is a cultural event that reveals how India processes state violence, constructs national identity, and negotiates the tension between democratic norms and covert operations. Zero Dark Thirty performed the same function for America. The difference is not that one film is better or more truthful than the other. The difference is that each film is truthful about a different thing: Zero Dark Thirty is truthful about the moral complexity of covert war, and Dhurandhar is truthful about the emotional reality of a nation that has decided to fight one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Zero Dark Thirty?

Dhurandhar and Zero Dark Thirty are both films about covert wars conducted by democracies against terrorist targets on foreign soil, but they take fundamentally different approaches to telling their stories. Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, depicts the decade-long CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden as an institutional effort driven by bureaucratic processes, procedural intelligence work, and a willingness to acknowledge the moral cost of torture and covert operations. Dhurandhar, directed by Aditya Dhar, depicts India’s covert penetration of Karachi’s criminal-intelligence nexus as a personal heroic journey driven by one operative’s extraordinary capabilities and righteous motivation. The films reveal more about their respective countries’ self-images than about the operational realities of the covert wars they depict.

Q: Is Dhurandhar India’s Zero Dark Thirty?

The comparison is frequently made because both films dramatize real covert operations against terrorist infrastructure on Pakistani soil. In structural terms, the comparison has merit: both films arrived during moments of intense national security discourse and both provided cinematic vocabulary for ongoing political conversations about state violence. In tonal and thematic terms, the comparison breaks down significantly. Zero Dark Thirty is deliberately ambiguous about the morality of what it depicts. Dhurandhar is deliberately unambiguous. Zero Dark Thirty focuses on institutional process. Dhurandhar focuses on personal heroism. Calling Dhurandhar “India’s Zero Dark Thirty” captures the surface similarity (a democracy makes a film about its covert war) while missing the deep divergence (the films construct entirely different narratives about what covert war means).

Q: Why does Zero Dark Thirty acknowledge torture while Dhurandhar does not question its violence?

The difference reflects both the temporal distance from the events depicted and the political-cultural environments in which each film was produced. Zero Dark Thirty arrived in 2012, more than a decade after September 11 and two years after the Abbottabad raid. America had sufficient distance from the foundational trauma to produce a film that interrogated its response. Dhurandhar arrived in 2025, in the immediate aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre and during an active shadow war. India had neither the temporal distance nor the political space for comparable interrogation. Additionally, America’s institutional framework for accountability, including congressional oversight and investigative journalism, created expectations that a serious covert war film would engage moral questions. India’s absence of comparable institutional oversight created no such expectation.

Q: Are both films equally mythological in different ways?

This analysis concludes that both films construct national myths, but in different registers. Zero Dark Thirty mythologizes by presenting the hunt for bin Laden as a story with a clean narrative arc and a definitive resolution, when the actual War on Terror had neither. It also mythologizes by centering the narrative on a single analyst’s lonely crusade, romanticizing individual genius within the institutional framework. Dhurandhar mythologizes more overtly by presenting the covert war as a hero’s journey driven by personal capability and righteous vengeance. Both films omit inconvenient realities: Zero Dark Thirty omits the drone program, the diplomatic fallout, and the ongoing conflict; Dhurandhar omits institutional accountability, legal questions, and the possibility that the mission might be wrong.

Q: Which film had more political impact domestically?

Dhurandhar had a significantly larger immediate political impact in India than Zero Dark Thirty had in America. Dhurandhar earned over 1,350 crore rupees worldwide and became the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025, reaching an audience many times larger relative to the national population than Zero Dark Thirty reached in the United States. The film shaped how millions of Indians conceptualized the shadow war and contributed to a political environment in which aggressive covert operations enjoy broad public support. Zero Dark Thirty’s political impact was more indirect: it contributed to an ongoing policy debate about torture, CIA oversight, and the ethics of targeted killing, but it did not produce the kind of mass cultural consensus that Dhurandhar achieved.

Q: How do the protagonists of the two films differ morally?

Maya, Zero Dark Thirty’s protagonist, occupies a morally ambiguous position. She participates in the enhanced interrogation program, not as a torturer but as a witness who becomes desensitized. Her obsession with finding bin Laden overrides considerations of personal relationships, institutional loyalty, and even personal safety. Her triumph at the film’s conclusion is presented as hollow: she has accomplished her goal and has nothing left. Mazari, Dhurandhar’s protagonist, occupies a morally clear position. His violence is righteous because his cause is righteous. His suffering ennobles him. His triumph is presented as genuinely triumphant: India’s enemies have been struck, and Mazari has fulfilled his duty. The moral clarity of Mazari’s position is part of Dhurandhar’s appeal. The moral ambiguity of Maya’s position is part of Zero Dark Thirty’s achievement.

Q: Were both films accused of government cooperation?

Both films faced allegations that their production teams received privileged access to intelligence information. In the American case, the CIA’s entertainment liaison office confirmed engagement with Bigelow and Boal, and congressional investigators examined whether classified information was improperly shared. The controversy produced a public record and ongoing debate about the intelligence community’s relationship with Hollywood. In the Indian case, the parents of Major Mohit Sharma filed a Delhi High Court petition alleging that the film’s protagonist was based on their deceased son, who had conducted a real undercover mission similar to the one depicted. Dhar denied the connection. No institutional investigation comparable to the American case has examined what access Dhar and his team received from Indian intelligence agencies.

Q: What does the comparison reveal about India and America?

The comparison reveals that each country constructs its covert war narrative to serve its current political needs. America in 2012 needed a narrative that acknowledged moral complexity because the country was reckoning with the costs of the War on Terror. India in 2025 needed a narrative that affirmed moral clarity because the country was asserting its right to conduct covert operations against an ongoing terrorist threat. Neither narrative is complete. America’s moral reckoning does not extend to the full scope of its covert operations (drone strikes, surveillance, indefinite detention). India’s moral assertion does not engage the full implications of its shadow war (sovereignty violations, extrajudicial killings, the absence of legal frameworks).

Q: Is Dhurandhar propaganda and Zero Dark Thirty art?

This binary is too simplistic. Both films are artistically accomplished commercial products that serve political functions. Dhurandhar has been called propaganda by critics like Uday Bhatia, who described it as designed to flatter ruling political leadership, and by Siddhant Adlakha, who noted its precarious balance between entertainment and hateful messaging. Zero Dark Thirty was called propaganda by Naomi Wolf, who compared Bigelow to Leni Riefenstahl, and by Michael Wolff, who described the film as a nasty piece of pulp and propaganda. Both accusations reflect the accusers’ political positions more than the films’ artistic intentions. A more productive frame is that both films are cultural products that construct national narratives about state violence, and that those narratives have political consequences regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions.

Q: Did Indian audiences reject moral complexity in cinema?

The evidence does not support the claim that Indian audiences are inherently opposed to moral complexity. Indian cinema has produced films that grapple with ambiguity in other contexts, including Haider (an adaptation of Hamlet set in Kashmir) and Visaranai (a Tamil film about police brutality). The absence of moral complexity in Dhurandhar reflects the specific political-cultural moment of 2025, not a permanent characteristic of Indian audiences. The post-Pahalgam environment created conditions in which moral complexity about covert operations was commercially risky and culturally unwelcome. Future Indian covert war films may well engage moral complexity once sufficient temporal distance from the shadow war permits it.

Q: How do the films handle the question of whether covert operations work?

Zero Dark Thirty presents the Abbottabad raid as a clear operational success but frames the preceding decade as a period of institutional failure, wasted resources, and moral compromise. The film implicitly asks whether the success justified the cost. Dhurandhar presents its covert operation as an unqualified success without comparable qualification. The shadow war’s effectiveness is treated as self-evident: the enemy is dismantled, the operatives succeed, and India is safer as a result. Zero Dark Thirty engages the effectiveness question. Dhurandhar assumes the answer.

Q: Which film is more operationally realistic?

Neither film is a documentary, and both take significant creative liberties with operational details. Zero Dark Thirty has been praised for its procedural realism, particularly its depiction of the intelligence analysis process and the Abbottabad raid sequence, which was choreographed with input from military advisors. The film has also been criticized for overstating the role of enhanced interrogation in producing actionable intelligence. Dhurandhar has been praised for its atmospheric rendering of Karachi’s underworld and its attention to the physical and psychological demands of undercover work. It has been criticized for compressing timelines, simplifying operational realities, and presenting a level of individual operational autonomy that real undercover agents rarely enjoy.

Q: Will India eventually produce its own Zero Dark Thirty?

The pattern from other democracies that have conducted targeted killing campaigns suggests that self-interrogating covert war cinema eventually follows operational cinema, but with a significant time lag. Israel produced Operation Thunderbolt (1977) as celebratory cinema and Munich (2005) as interrogatory cinema, a gap of twenty-eight years. America produced Black Hawk Down (2001) as operational cinema and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) as interrogatory cinema, a gap of eleven years. If India follows this pattern, an Indian covert war film that engages moral complexity may emerge a decade or more after the shadow war concludes or recedes from immediate political salience. Dhurandhar’s sequel, which has already been released with even greater commercial success, suggests that the current trajectory is toward escalation rather than interrogation.

Q: How did critics in each country respond to the respective films?

Zero Dark Thirty received near-universal critical acclaim in the United States, with the primary debate centering not on the film’s quality but on its political implications. The film appeared on 95 critics’ top ten lists for 2012 and earned five Academy Award nominations. Indian critics were more divided on Dhurandhar. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh praised it as brilliant with strong storytelling. The Hindu described it as overstretched and chest-thumping. Mint called it propaganda in service of a hawkish India. IGN rated it 8 out of 10 but cautioned about its proximity to hateful messaging. The critical division in India reflects the deeper division in Indian society about the shadow war itself: is aggressive covert action justified or is it jingoistic overreach?

Q: What role does music play in each film’s narrative construction?

Zero Dark Thirty uses Alexandre Desplat’s score sparingly, and much of the film unfolds in near-silence or with ambient sound. The Abbottabad raid sequence is deliberately underscored, relying on the sounds of helicopter rotors, gunfire, and screaming rather than a triumphant soundtrack. This sonic restraint reinforces the film’s anti-mythological aesthetic. Dhurandhar’s score by Shashwat Sachdev is an active participant in the narrative, pounding and relentless during action sequences and haunting during emotional beats. The film’s soundtrack, including Flipperachi’s track accompanying Akshaye Khanna’s character introduction, became a cultural phenomenon in its own right. The contrast in musical approach mirrors the broader contrast between procedural restraint and mythological amplification.

Q: How do the two films depict Pakistan?

Both films set significant portions of their narratives in Pakistan, but their depictions diverge sharply. Zero Dark Thirty presents Pakistan as a complex operational environment: the CIA maintains a significant station in Islamabad, cooperates (partially and imperfectly) with Pakistani intelligence, and navigates a political relationship that is simultaneously adversarial and collaborative. Pakistani characters include intelligence professionals, informants, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Dhurandhar presents Pakistan through a darker lens: Karachi’s underworld is depicted as a lawless space where the ISI, organized crime, and terrorism form an interconnected nexus. Pakistani characters are primarily antagonists whose corruption and violence provide the justification for Indian intervention. Both depictions are reductive, but they are reductive in different directions.

Q: Could a Pakistani filmmaker make a comparable film?

Pakistani cinema has not produced a covert war film comparable to either Zero Dark Thirty or Dhurandhar, in part because Pakistan’s relationship with its own intelligence agencies and covert operations is even more opaque than India’s or America’s. The ISI operates without any meaningful civilian oversight, and the Pakistani military’s role in sponsoring, managing, and deploying militant organizations has been a source of internal political controversy that Pakistani filmmakers have been reluctant or unable to address directly. A Pakistani Zero Dark Thirty or a Pakistani Dhurandhar would require a level of creative freedom and institutional tolerance that the current Pakistani political-cultural environment does not provide.

Q: What is the significance of each film’s ending?

Zero Dark Thirty ends with Maya sitting alone on a C-17 military transport aircraft. A crew member asks where she wants to go. She does not answer. Tears stream down her face. The screen cuts to black. The ending denies the audience closure: Maya has accomplished the singular goal that defined her professional existence, and she is left with nothing. It is an ending that questions whether the achievement was worth the cost. Dhurandhar ends on a different note, with Mazari’s mission continuing and the shadow war’s next phase implied. The ending affirms rather than questions: the work goes on, the fight continues, and the hero remains committed. Maya’s ending is an elegy. Mazari’s ending is a promise.

Q: How do academic scholars view these films?

Academic analysis of Zero Dark Thirty has been extensive, spanning film studies, political science, international relations, and ethics. Scholars have debated the film’s treatment of torture, its construction of the intelligence analyst as protagonist, its relationship to CIA information, and its political timing. Bruce Hoffman has referenced the broader phenomenon of how cinematic narratives shape public understanding of counter-terrorism. Academic analysis of Dhurandhar is still emerging, but scholars like Jyotirmaya Sharma, whose work on Indian nationalism provides a framework for understanding the film’s cultural function, have addressed the broader phenomenon of Bollywood’s role in constructing nationalist consensus. The academic trajectory suggests that Dhurandhar will receive increasing scholarly attention as the shadow war it depicts becomes subject to historical analysis.

Q: Are there other films that compare with these two?

The closest comparator for the pairing is Munich (2005), Steven Spielberg’s film about Israel’s response to the 1972 Olympics massacre. Munich occupies a middle position between Zero Dark Thirty’s procedural realism and Dhurandhar’s heroic mythology, depicting targeted assassination as both operationally effective and psychologically devastating. The comparison between Dhurandhar and Munich has been analyzed separately in this series. Other relevant comparators include Body of Lies (2008), Eye in the Sky (2015), and the Indian counter-terrorism film trilogy of Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar that charts the evolution of India’s cinematic relationship with covert operations.