Just saw it. I really did not like it. It bored me to tears and I really can’t imagine much, if any but the core premise, was based on anything close to reality.
The pacing felt really poor and it all felt jumbled together. I expected to see some of the preparation work that went into planning breaching the compound, but instead they launched right into it.
I thought Hurt Locker was a far better movie.
Meh. I thought it was a bit cold and sterile. I didn’t care about the lead character at all. Even the ending shot of her crying in the airplane felt emotionless to me.
Just saw it On Demand.
I liked The Hurt Locker a lot, because that was a movie about people. This was a movie about bureaucracy. And not even a good movie about bureaucracy. I assume most of you have been in one, or at least had bosses you had to report to. If you couldn’t make a coherent case to your boss about a project but ended up screaming in his face “I wanna!” how seriously would you be taken?
Jessica Chastain has no screen presence. Maybe that meant she disappeared into her character. The movie absolutely needed her to have an internal life that explained her crusade. We all understand that USL was a bad guy. We need to understand her understanding that. She gave us nothing. Well, a bit of lunacy now and then. Not really sufficient.
The recreations were excellent, but I kept getting the feeling that I was watching a Lego version of reality except on a Hollywood budget. Maybe the hype affected the way I watched, but I was wildly underwhelmed. Spielberg had great set direction, too, but I saw people inhabiting the costumes. Here I didn’t even get good costumes. A big disappointment.
I saw it recently and also found it merely okay. I have nothing against Jessica Chastain, but she was miscast and unconvincing in this role, and one of the major problems with the movie.
I saw it a couple of weeks ago through Netflix and liked it. One question, though. In one scene, Maya’s supervisor asked her how long she’d been with the agency and I thought it was said that she’d been there since high school. So was the idea that she hadn’t even been to college? Do they actually do that; recruit people right out of high school for intelligence work?
And as for the torture scenes, they bothered me a bit but I wasn’t as offended by them as some people in Congress, since in this case the intention was to find Bin Laden. It seemed more purposeful and legitimate than the random cruelty of Abu Ghirab.
I saw it again with my wife this past Friday night and she really liked it - thought it was much better than Argo (though for some that may be damning with faint praise.)
The only real prop I have for this movie is that accurately portrayed the attack on Bin Laden’s compound as related in the book No Easy Day, which was written by one of the team members. There is a lot of misinformation out there about what happened.
It seems odd that this thread is so short.
This is the scene I was referring to:
I thought that they were implying something about Maya’s background.
I don’t know about “recruit” but I’ve been at a federal government job fair where I put in an application for a CIA courier. No college required, just a high school diploma and a driver’s license
The torture scenes were necessary because the movie wanted you to question whether the hunt for Bin Laden was worth it. That’s what the final shot of the movie was all about. Maya wasn’t happy at the end. She was full of doubt, wondering whether everything she and the country sacrificed to capture Bin Laden was worth it.
While no one who was waterboarded gave information that was used in the hunt for Bin Laden, other detainees who where subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques did give information about Bin Laden. The movie also never says any of these enhanced interrogation techniques were essential in his capture.
Since the writer of the movie wanted the audience to question torture, I can understand why he would show someone being waterboarded who gave up information. It’s more cinematic that way, and puts all the questions related to torture in one scene instead of wasting time spreading them among multiple detainees.
I didn’t see it like this at all. My interpretation of the final shot is that with USL dead, her life was over too. She had been a machine thinking of nothing else for ten years and now her life no longer has a purpose. She was crying for her lost self. There was no indication that the movie looked at whether the sacrifice was worth it.
Because he’s an amoral asshole? He stacked the deck in favour of torture, by pretending that it isn’t completely useless.
You are certainly free to interpret the ending that way. However, there are several points in the movie where Maya has to convince bureaucrats to keep searching for Bin Laden while they argue against wasting more lives or resources searching for someone who is no longer a huge threat.
You can fall on either side of that debate, but the conflict is present throughout the movie. I also think the movie questions our motives for going after UBL. Was there sound policy reasons to justify our hunt for UBL, or was this motivated by emotional reasons such as revenge? The same question goes for why we used enhanced interrogation techniques to search for UBL.
It’s not completely useless. It might not be the best method of obtaining information, but you can obtain information with it.
I just saw this film. I hope it’s not out-of-line for me to bump this almost five-year-old thread. Zero Dark Thirty seemed better than most movies but had a certain “blandness.” Yet the very “blandness” was intriguing.
I agree with these comments:
The final scene disappointed me, at first. I was expecting a final Hip Hip Hooray, perhaps Obama pinning a medal on Maya! Instead the poignant but rather “bland” ending was special and unique.