I have to say…it was OK. The entire first 2 hours or so are basically dedicated to the hunt for Bin Laden. I have absolutely zero idea how much is true and how much is made up. I tend to assume most of the entire first 2 hours are fictional, broadly based on true accounts. The movie does say it is based on true accounts, but I take that to mean…practically nothing.
However, the raid of Bin Laden’s compound was amazing! It was very well shot and edited and was incredibly tense.
Overall, it was about a 7/10 from me. 10/10 for the raid, though. Neat.
I saw it and was fascinated throughout. I couldn’t watch the torture scenes though. They’re brutal and knowing they were much worse in real life was hard. I don’t know that the movie takes as much of a pro-torture stance as some have claimed (no cites, it’s just a gist I got from various places) but it’s certainly not condemned and it certainly seemed to be shown to be useful at times, when the agents are trying to piece together names and relationships. They have to cull what’s bullshit that’s told to them to get the torture to stop, from real bits of information that slips out or is given to confuse the agents about what’s true and what’s false.
As a procedural, it’s excellent. The writing, directing, editing and acting is all top-tier. I hope Jessica Chastain wins Best Actress. It was fantastic to see Jennifer Ehle in such a great, if somewhat small, role.
Yes, I’m glad OBL is dead (and yes, I’m glad it happened on President Obama’s watch) and it was interesting to see some of the behind-the-scenes workings of what it took to get him but I left with a huge knot in my stomach. This film can and probably will be a perfect recruiting tool for generations of would-be terrorists. We’ll never know how much.
The film hasn’t opened here yet, but I do want to see it. I am a big fan of Homeland and this looks like a nice companion piece.
However, I too was wondering how this film is going to be received when it hits DVD and gets widely distributed in some foreign countries. If they flipped out about a fictional film about Mohammed, I can’t imagine this (semi-documentary?) film about torture and the killing Bin Laden is going to make people in the Middle East feel all warm and fuzzy at the end.
Then again - I haven’t seen it so not sure what the message is when you leave the theater.
To anyone who’s seen it, do they portray torture as an actual method of getting information from captives? I remember I saw a letter from a few senators that claimed the CIA misled the makers of the film into thinking this:
I just saw it today and really liked it. The procedural aspects were surprisingly compelling to me and the acting was great all around (though some of the accents were pretty sketchy). Jessica Chastain was fantastic, as well. Though some of the Seal briefing stuff was off, the actual assault was pretty spot-on compared to the book “No Easy Day”. That scene, in particular, was riveting, IMO. And it’s kinda geeky, but I loved the sound of their surpressed SMGs.
They do portray torture a lot in the early movie (waterboarding, shoving someone in a tiny box, sleep deprivation, beatings) but some of the important information they get comes more from deception and nicer tactics. There is a LOT of interrogation and videos of interrogation in the movie, so it all starts to blend together.
I have yet to see the movie–I intend to–so I can’t comment on it, but I thought you all might be interested in this Post op-ed by a CIA operative involved in the manhunt. Presented without comment:
The author seems to have a pretty clear agenda of defending waterboarding as both not torture and valuable. I found his reasoning in this portion to be especially tortured:
Critics (like the bipartisan Senate committee) who say waterboarding played no roll in tracking Bin Laden down are wrong, because the guy who wasn’t waterboarded gave useful information about the courier, and the guy who was waterboarded continued to deny any knowledge of the courier, and actually told others to deny any knowledge of the courier. One can only imagine how uncooperative KSM would have been if we hadn’t waterboarded him.
Which makes the author’s insistence that it played a role in catching Bin Laden even stranger. He seems to be saying “Look, we only water boarded 3 people, it stopped years ago, it wasn’t as bad as the movie makes it out, and it shouldn’t be considered torture” in addition to saying that a guy who hadn’t been water boarded gave them useful intelligence on bin Laden’s courier while the guy who had been water boarded continued to deny everything… and from this he concludes that the “critics are wrong” to dismiss the role of water boarding in tracking down Bin Laden.
The movie was great, and it was remarked a couple of times that the information used to identify OBL’s courier was from “detainees”, which indicated (to me at least) that information from torture was used to eventually find OBL. But it wasn’t that they were torturing a guy and he gave up an address or anything. The real “break” in the case was when somebody found a file that had been lost for 9 years or so.
I liked it. It was long but I found it to be engaging. I’m not sure what the takeaway was and maybe that’s half the point. How are you supposed to feel after chasing one goal for 10 years? Yeah you’re beyond happy, but what now?
The only knock was that I found most of the violence predictable. I was always braced for shots fired or explosions when I saw others jumping. I don’t think it’s a bad thing though. Maybe I was just always on edge. I don’t know.
I was underwhelmed. I think it is being hailed because it is currently of the moment. I don’t think future generations will be as impressed by it as a film.
I also saw “The Impossible” this past week and…
I was struck by the coincidence that both films ended exactly the same way, with a shot of a beautiful red-haired woman in tears on an airplane.
To me, there are two breeds of good-to-great films. One type has a visceral, vibrant connection to the viewer, and for me tends to be recalled in terms of a few scenes that defined the experience.
The other has an intellectual connection, and for me tends to be recalled in terms of the whole, not individual scenes or performances.
Zero Dark Thirty is of the latter type, and is #8 on my top ten for the year. I got a lot out of it, it conveyed the shifting tactics of post-9/11 intelligence operations, and the maddening difficulty and uncertainty of intelligence work itself. It’s a world of known unknowns and unknown unknowns; where moral purity goes to die and a life outside the work is a hindrance.
The film would make an interesting double feature with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for a look at how the intelligence community changed from the Cold War to the War on Terror, while remaining a draining, uncertain business of lies and bureaucracy.
It’s one-sided presentation makes it pale in comparison to classic insurgency/terrorist hunt films such as The Battle of Algiers or Army of Shadows. It is very much a piece of its time. And the investigation and internal machinations, while reasonably accurate (for a fictionalized, condensed account), is presented with a distinct American bent. I don’t know that I would characterize the film as being pro-torture–after all, the critical piece of information was initially discarded and ignored for years for being suspect as coerced information, highlighting the problem that much of the information acquired by tortured isn’t trusted even by interrogators–but the film gives little sense for how abduction and “enhanced interrogation” reduced the sympathy for and cooperation with the US.
However, the 25 minute assault on the compound is probably one of the most realistic portrayals of a tactical operation ever put to film. Instead of the typical “toss in flash-bangs and ten guys jumping through the door,” that you see in most films (which would put the first guys going through the door at grave risk), the film portrays careful, coordinated movement at an almost lugubrious pace. When they do run into a shooter, their response is so practiced and thorough (such as putting an extra few rounds into the downed shooter to make sure he stays down) that there is scarcely any threat. And the film indicates why every soldier (or sailor in this case) hates and distrusts whirly-birds with a passion otherwise reserved for people who fart in elevators.
Chastain did a good job with the role of Maya (which is clearly a composite of a number of people) but really, she’s there to advance the plot. It is convenient that she has no personal life to detail and her only friend is killed in a terrorist attack which drives her obsessiveness, but there isn’t much of a character to flesh out.
Some good performances and the UBL operation do not a great movie make.
I’ll throw PC to the wind and call it a chick flick, produced and directed by women for women.
The early torture scenes were sanitized but brutal enough to get the message across that torture is bad. The hero is disturbed by the brutality but pushes through because she it tough. You know she is tough because she drinks and smokes and swears, but she only does those things enough to show that she is tough.
The movie is full of what, IMHO, is the real mark of a chick flick; lots and lots of “meaningful looks.” When meaningful looks take place, men scratch something, rearrange their junk, and wait for the next explosion, while women tend to construct long, complicated scenarios about what the meaningful looks really mean.
Stars like Eastwood and Stallone do the meaningful look so well that their male oriented action movies are also acceptable to female audiences, but there is no Eastwood or Stallone in this movie, and the sanitized violence, like putting the second shot into the bad guys gut rather than his head keeps it out of the blockbuster action movie category.
A well made movie for what it is – a feminist slanted war-is-bad morality tale.
I didn’t get that at all. The torture, IMO, isn’t portrayed as good or bad. Whether the torture led to any useful information was ambiguous. The story is essentially apolitical. It wasn’t saying anything about whether the U.S. should have invaded Afghanistan or even if the killing of OBL was the “right” thing to do. There was no celebrating after the mission was accomplished and no jingoistic feelings of patriotism. It was just people doing their jobs.
Parts of it were very compelling, but I didn’t really connect with Maya. I get that her obsession with the investigation was supposed to drive the plot, but she just seemed to get in the way for me. I didn’t really care about her problems/feelings in light of all the much more interesting and pertinent things going on. The guy who was doing the “advanced interrogation” but decided to take a hiatus, I would have liked to hear more insights from. Or the guy who was tortured. Or the Navy Seals! Come on. Frankly, she was the least interesting character in the film and I have no idea why she was the only main character. Maybe if they had included any background information about her at all other than “she’s fucking smart” I would have cared what happened to her.
Plus, the rest of the movie felt so realistic, all of the supermodels working for the CIA/military really messed with my suspension of disbelief. I mean, did everyone need to be that sexy? Seems like 2 or even 3 sexy people would have sufficed.
If they had more John Barrowman clones in the Pentagon, I’d consider changing professions.
The main criticism of this movie – and indeed of Hurt Locker – is that Bigelow doesn’t take a moral stance on what the characters do or the war in general. She just shows it. They’re grumbling in Zero Dark Thirty about how a lack of detainees is making their jobs harder, but I don’t think that should be the voice of the author. The problem here is that in Hurt Locker, the story was obviously not “this war is bad” or “this war is necessary” but instead “here is a deconstruction of what war does to different kinds of people and why. They’re not necessarily bad people or good people or weak people or strong people. It’s not weakness or strength that makes a person react in different ways to the ultimate in stressful situations.”
So what’s the message, therefore, of Zero Dark Thirty? I think it comes off as a procedural because, if we take away any moral questions about torture (and just as I argue for Hurt Locker, if it isn’t the focus of the movie the side we come down on is irrelevant) most of the rest of the movie is just a narrative.
Until the last bit, at least. When we have the chance to consider that the narrative starts on 9/11 and Maya starts her work in 2003 and ends it when OBL is killed. It’s the only thing she’s worked on for almost a decade. It’s the first project she worked on out of high school. It consumed her life, and she never allowed room for anything else. It’s over. It’s done. She was successful, and that’s almost as crushing as failure.
I just saw the movie and there were bits of it that were distracting. I agree with Romadea that the Maya character is a bland one, but she was necessary in order to weave a coherent narrative. You shouldn’t have to change protagonists midstream.
The distracting bits:
The Jordanian doctor’s suicide mission.
The text/gchat/instant messaging conversation leading up to the suicide mission.
The attitude she carries for her superiors. I don’t know how much of it was intended to be eye-rolling (the mother-fucker line) and how much is unintended (the dry erase marker, the tirade in the hallway, the 100% certainty, more demands for surveillance, telling off seal team 6…) but it comes off as horribly contrived out-of-character which is hard since Maya is a sketchily defined character.
Chris Pratt. Love the guy but this was a bad call casting-wise imo.
Oddly paced. The bribe scene felt especially rushed. Then it was slow as hell in getting to the courier. Then it was much too quick that we linked the courier to UBL.
UBL. Need to establish that earlier.
What a shitty way to treat the intern after she helped you out big time. I was expecting her to be a much bigger role. In fact, I was expecting a lot of people to be bigger roles and really drive home that this was a group effort and not the Maya show.
How Maya switches back and forth from hardass to weeping mess to calculating automaton. A credit to being a chameleon but discredit to go on schizo. The most distracting part was when she told Seal Team 6 that she wanted to drop a bomb on it but having them go in and KILL ON HER BEHALF would have to do. Um… so did you want that intelligence? No? You’d just rather blow them all to hell? Fuck the mountains of information which would effectively tear down Al Qaeda - which is your entire livelihood because you don’t like velcro? How long did you have that line chambered? Did you run it through a 2nd edit? I don’t like your bootstraps and k-rations… how about gear and velcro? Jeebus.
How many seal team 6 members were just standing around, lining the halls 8-10 deep while they wait to clear the doors? I was expecting them to be more swat-like in their efficiency - covering doors and exits etc. Maybe more than just 1 rooftop spotter…
How absolutely haphazard the torture scenes were scripted. Maya says we should go back in there, and the gang just rolls back in? Then just decide on the spot you want to waterboard someone, snap your fingers, and waterboard? Everyone has to be on the same page. What would happen if Maya wasn’t in that room and wanted to watch from the monitor as suggested? Who would fill the pitcher? Torture simply would not work that way. The rules have to be clearly defined and the goals have to be clearly defined. The punishments have to make sense, and have purpose. When the attacks are seemingly random and irrational, then it’s just sadism for sadism’s sake and not constructive at all.
One can only imagine how uncooperative KSM would have been if we hadn’t waterboarded him.
