Sony Pictures basically announced Zero Dark Thirty to general audiences with the teaser trailer and five official stills this morning.  The trailer, though quite teasery, is a confident introduction to this fact-based account of the hunt to find the face of international terrorism, laying on the intensity and showing off a cool, entirely appropriate redacted marker motif. 

The images, meanwhile, puts forward some members of the film's formidable ensemble.  There are some pictures of Navy SEALs in action, but the inclusion of tense-looking intelligence professionals makes it clear that Zero Dark Thirty is about the process of finding bin Laden, not just the jingoistic action behind taking him out.  That makes sense, since Bigelow and journalist-turned-The Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal were working on this well before the successful SEAL Team 6 strike in Pakistan last May, and subsequently overhauled the last act to incorporate that mission.

Bigelow and Boal have been working on this one for a while, though it looked like Triple Frontier was going to be their follow up to the 2008 Best Picture winner.  When the news hit last May, this project was way out ahead of any other potential movie taking on the material, and Zero Dark Thirty got a lot of momentum seemingly overnight.

The cast includes a lot of damn good actors, so let's just run through them here: Joel Edgerton, Kyle Chandler, Jessica Chastain, Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau, Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle, Edgar Ramirez, Stephen Dillane, Mark Duplass, Jason Clarke, Scott Adkins, and Frank Grillo.

Entertainment Weekly debuted the pictures you see below.  Zero Dark Thirty arrives in theaters on December 19th of this year.