ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow 2012)

[Chris Knipp]

Kathryn Bigelow: ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

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Red headed CIA lady finds Bin Laden?

From Kathryn Bigelow, gifted maker of macho action films, comes Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Bin Laden that ended in a Navy Seal kill raid in Pakistan in May 2011.

The film is realistic and in-your-face in style, at least for the violent action parts. It's numbingly procedural though vivid enough to hold the attention, despite lacking ordinary suspense or thrills. But it raises many questions and gives few answers, and some of the answers it gives are obviously untrue. If you ask who was behind the success of the CIA effort to track down Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty will tell you it was a young woman named Maya (Jessica Chastain). Every step of the way it's Wonder Woman's determination that saves the day. But this was obviously a complex collective effort, and if there were a real Maya we'd know of her. Moreover Maya isn't even as interesting a character as the stolid bomb deconstructor played by Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. The new film's female protagonist may provide a satisfying focus, but it's a complete distortion. Just a film, you say? But here is the paradox: an almost crushing sense of realism pervades a film that's a falsification in basic ways.

Zero Dark Thiry -- the title, as with The Hurt Locker, a US military jargon-phrase not explained on screen -- raises many other questions. The first ones concern Kathryn Bigelow's motives. Was it wise even to make this film, so soon after another intense military story, The Hurt Locker? What's behind this admiring focus on the US military, and now on the CIA? Has Bigelow gone over the deep end in some way? And what about the picture itself? Isn't it a little soon after the events? Starting with blank-screen recordings of 9/11 WTC victims' voices, themselves mostly a confused cacophony, moving through interrogations and searches and ending with the green images of the Seals' night-vision helicopter attacvk, this reads as an elaborate revenge flick. But when it comes to revenge, Tartantino is your man. Bigelow leaves the viewer merely exhausted and unsatisfied, like her protagonist, who seems rudderless at the end, like the student who passes her orals and then wanders the campus in a daze with no remaining sense of purpose.

About the events themselves there are questions, also unanswered: assuming it's well established that Bin Laden was as much behind 9/11 as he was behind many other Al Qaeda attacks, which is doubtless so, is hunting him down and killing him a good way to prevent future attacks? And if it is, isn't taking ten years to do it a little embarrassing?

Critics of the film, some without seeing it, raise the issue of its supposed advocacy of torture, since the first forty minutes mainly focus on the "enhanced interrogation methods" being applied to one or two prisoners, and Maya may seem to emerge from these events with leads to a certain "Abu Ahmad" (she pronounces it "Akmad"), a trusted courrier who may inadvertently, if found, point the way to the boss. But before pointing the finger at torture advocacy, we must note the pointed irony of showing Senator Obama declaring that "we" don't use torture, and the fact that the prisoner reveals the information not while being tortured, but over a tasty Middle Eastern meal he's served afterward. The whole thing is that this film isn't advocating torture, or anything. But maybe it is, because making a film about all this stuff certainly implies that we should consider it all, including the torture and the killing of Bin Laden, crucial in some way.

Boal and Bigelow collaborate to provide an exceptional wealth of detail, though they're more at ease with brute force than with normal conversation. Gone is all the entertainment and excitement and sheer fun that enlivened Bigelow's Point Break. The Navy Seals' operation in particular provides a sense of minute-by-minute accuracy. The only trouble is that we need help sifting through detail (as does the viewer of Zodiac); not being Navy Seals, we have a hard time knowing what's going on, and the detail only confuses us. This is why Rex Reed complained, with some reason, that Zero Dark Thirty isn't a movie. Before this climax finally comes in the last forty minutes of the film there is a lot of other stuff, sifting through names and photographs of bearded Middle Eastern suspects, who never emerge with much clarity. The focus is on the hunt, not the game. Every ten minutes or so Bigelow gives us a terrorist bomb as if to liven things up with some loud noises (just like any other action blockbuster), including an impressive scene where Maya and a female colleague are blown off their seats in a restaurant at the Islamabad Marriott and everything else flies off at the wall. There's even reference to the man who tried to blow up Times Square, used against Maya to suggest she's wasting the CIA's time and money out there in Pakistan. In between these explosions or threats of them there are a lot of office scenes, computers, men in suits, conferences, with Jessica Chastain and James Gandolfini trading F-words to liven things up. "I'm the M-F who found this place," Maya tells a high White House official in a big meeting, referring to the Bin Laden compound, typically hogging the spotlight and stunning all present, perhaps including us.

Here's another question: is this a great movie, or a great waste of talent? For all its stunning action scenes, this film's skewed point of view attributes far too much to a nonexistent protagonist, distorting everything. This perhaps explains why the final big Navy Seals sequence seems, as Variety's Peter Debruge puts it, "almost anti-climactic."

Zero Dark Thirty began a limited American release from 19 Dec. 2012. It opens wide in the US 11 Jan. 2013; in the UK it plays from 25 Jan. 3013.

[Chris Knipp]

ZERO DARK THIRTY isn't anywhere on my 2012 Best Lists because I saw it after making them up. But I don't mind leaving it off because I think it has been overrated by the critics, in general. I gave it a 7/10 on another site. Its Metacritic rating is an astronomical 95 and some think ZD30 fulfils the promise of the already highly rated HURT LOCKER, or achieves fully what Bigelow was shooting for in HURT LOCKER, whatever that might mean. I think on the contrary THE HURT LOCKER is better, more coherent, more a real film, neater narratively, richer as character development than ZD30 and it must be that people are impressed by the new movie's numbingly "realistic" style -- despite its being quite unconvincing and false as a representation of the CIA, of torture, of the hunt for Bin Laden, everything it deals with, and very similar to various other American action films about the Middle East and terrorism. (That people think ARGO is realistic give you an idea of how far off American judgments are on movies about political events and the history of conflict.) Obviously Kathryn Bigelow is an accomplished action director, but I think she has gone wrong. Maybe the high ratings are due to the fact that the critics think the subject matter is of great importance, that the 9/11 theme finally has been done well. I don't even think there is a 9/11 theme. The term is at once too comprehensive and too specific.

However because Bigelow is an important director and because ZD30 is so controversial and highly rated, I think everybody should see it and put in their two cents. It deserves some place on my 2012 Lists but I'm not sure where. Leaving if off entirely may be a good way of taking it down a peg. The most obvious place to put it despite the fact that some of the sequences are very well done is in the Most Overrated list, because the Metacritic score of 95 shows the critics have gone way overboard.

Viewers might do better watching Nick Broomfield's THE BATTLE FOR HADITHA. Americans need to learn how much the US has gotten everything wrong in their "war on terror" and no meticulous (or falsified) account of the hunt for Bin Laden is going to do much toward getting things right.

[Chris Knipp]

Friday 11 Jan. 2013. ZERO DARK THIRTY opened wide today. For some reason it opened a week earlier in the San Francisco Bay area, having had an Oscar-qualifying 2012 NYC and LA release 19 Dec.

[tabuno]

The very beginning black screen of the movie with only the audio 911
calls seemed to be, understandably chaotic, but in the directorial use
of such audio chaos, it also provoked unnecessary confusion and
detachment from the more reflective emotional aftershock of the event.
Oddly enough the physical violence of the interrogation scenes were
tame compared to the fictional violence of most action, adventure
thrillers such as Daniel Craig's brutal beating in Skyfall (2012) and
even such actions as urinating on the detainees which was widely
reported by the news media at the time were omitted. Jessica Chastain's
character was also uncharacteristically stereotypical during the early
torture scenes with the requisite facial expressions of supposedly
suppressed disgust. Her character throughout the movie was
underdeveloped with no backstory, not significant revelation of her
attitude, motivation except implicit hatred and revenge. There is the
bus explosion which is also oddly inconsistently muted and only
indirectly shot. All these minor flaws only contribute to any uneven
flow and tempo of most the movie until the final insurgent sequences.
By the end, there are two shots, one an editing flow problem where one
moment the American insurgent team or on the ground and then suddenly
in the air and finally Chastain's character is asked where she'd like
to go with no response and no shot of the airman who asked the question
before the fade out.

Comparatively speaking, the ending and climax of the movie is
technically similar to the amazing, ground breaking beginning sequence
of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and has some of the visceral compelling
intensity of Black Hawk Down (2001). Yet in some ways, most of the the
cinematography isn't quite as densely raw and rich as United 93 (2006),
Body of Lies (2008), or Munich (2005). As discussed, the movie is also
missing the rich depth of the humanity of the characters as portrayed
in Breach (2007), Jarhead (2005), Manhunter (1986), and even Apocalypse
Now (1979) or the balanced depiction of the characters on both sides of
this military conflicts as better presented in Green Zone (2010) which
also had several strong military action scenes. As for Argo (2012),
Zero Dark Thirty's contemporary movie, Argo was more consistent, more
emotionally riveting, and had more connective depth. If only Kathryn
Bigelow as a director has been able to learn from director Sidney
Lumet's fine black and white gripping and tense focus in Fail-Safe
(1964) what could have this movie become.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm not sure you proved the first part of your title, the compelling editing. Obviously I think we can see that Bigelow is trying consciously to avoid or transcend the more conventional kind of thriller action we get well demonstrated in ARGO. I do agree with your criticisms, and your points about the "enhanced interrogation techniques" segments at the outset are well taken. The only thing that makes these sessions intense is that they attempt in part to reproduce accurately actual methods recently used for post 911 prisoners, and the controversy about whether this representation of them in a tale of tracking down Bin Laden claims torture was an integral part of the investigation that contributed essential information. This, in real life, is moot. Various officials have offer disclaimers, saying that Bin Laden could have been found without torture, even if information gathered during torture sessions was used in tracking him down. In the movie it is also moot, as far as I could tell. What is clear is that it was meant to make an intense grabber of an opening section. That's moot too.

I'd like to call your attention to the context provided by the smart maverick critic Armond White in his review (http://cityarts.info/2012/12/28/zero-for-conduct/), "Zero for Conduct." He also mentions BLACK HAWK DOWN but you probably wont like how. I personally found that a technically accomplished but detestable, soulless film.

I appreciate your mentioning JARHEAD. I quite like that movie, which captures the nature of war in a new and fresh way. . GREEN ZONE, RENDITION, and various other post-911 movies need to be compared to this new one by Bigelow and I think we'll find there are many elements in common and less to justify the through-the-roof rating ZD30 has gotten.

Bigelow/Boal here and in THE HURT LOCKER clearly lack any sense of humor. The idea that the hunt for Bin Laden and the millions spent to kill him off ten years after 911 might be in some ways as abstract and ironic as the Gulf War in JARHEAD or as comical as THREE KINGS would never have occurred to them; might be regarded as sacrilege. But what is that saying about history occurring two ways, first as tragedy, then as comedy? We need the comedy part in order to understand. We need a perspective on American triumphalism. Bigelow does not provide it.

[Chris Knipp]

The following, published by Counterpunch today (12 Feb. 2013), has already been heavily re-posted on the Web, but now that a friend has drawn my attention to it I feela a it's such a devastatingly funny panI feel Filmleaf readers need a chance to read, laugh, and weep.

Original Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/12/we-already-know-zero-dark-thirtys-evil-but-is-it-any-good/

Call Out the Vigilantes! Terrorism, Inc. Just Blew Up the Twin Towers!

We Already Know “Zero Dark Thirty’s” Evil, But Is It Any Good?

by UNCLE RAY BIRNEY
Okay movie fans, you’ve all heard about Zero Dark Thirty’s blasé attitude toward torture, blah, blah, blah, but what the hell? Enough already, with the depressing shit—let’s talk about what you GET when you buy your ticket and a box of popcorn.

Well, first of all, you get Osama. The Bin Man! 20,000 watts of the old Bin Laden Star Power. This guy doesn’t even have to show up, and you already got the premise for a pretty crazy Man Hunt. Forget The Joker, forget Doctor Octopus, forget the wacko in Skyfall!!! Osama’s the Mama of All Super Villains.

Watching the Bin-ster read the Kor’an gave you chills, right? Fuckin’ A. The dude could read the Manhattan White Pages and make you shit your pants. Somebody tell Freddy Kruger to put his finger-slashers in his pockets and slink outta here—America’s “Mister Nightmare on Canal Street” just became the Star of his own picture. So let “The Greatest Manhunt in History” begin! How’re you going to tell the final chapter of Osama story?

Well, right off the bat, you buy a few selected 9/11 emergency calls to the Nine-One-One operators—calls made by the poor victims in those towering infernos. You open your picture by playing those calls—over what? You play them over a fucking BLACK screen!

The screen is black so that you can HEAR them better! And when you hear them, it takes you back. Back, back, maybe eleven years, to THAT DAY. Your guts start wriggling around in your stomach and your blood starts pumping in your neck and your head. People are screaming for their lives, burning up. This is REAL reality show stuff.

Then, the phones go dead. The 911 operator says, “Is anybody there?” No answer! Silence. The Horror of that day! How will we EVER get over it? Talk about PTSD. Okay, fuck it! We’re gonna get the Monster that did this, and we’re gonna blow his Muslim ass all the way to the Muslim Kingdom Come!

That is, if we can FIND the fucker. He is so fucking evil and so fucking cunning, we’re gonna have to pull some serious strings to figure out where his hidey-hole is. So, okay, black screen is over. Next, we see an Arab-looking dude strung up with some serious looking ropes tied around his wrist bones, and blood and lumps on his face. Good! Let him suffer! Motherfucking Arab, probably knows where the fucking Arab Potentate Godfather “Binny” is hiding out! Go, C-I-A! Kick his fucking ass, make him squeal!

We’d all have to agree: This movie is off to a flying start. It’s really moving. And we’re only into, like, three minutes of it!

So, okay, spoiler alert! Now, some boring shit is about to happen. They torture the guy, he doesn’t talk; they torture him some more, he doesn’t talk. It gets a little repetitious, if you know what I mean, UNLESS you’re into that pain-inflicting thing.

But never fear, the picture has another thing going for it—Jessica Fucking Chastain. Hottest Babe of 2012, maybe of 2013 as well. SO hot, she made so-called “Professional” Film Critics cream their pants. Just HOW hot is Chastain? Hot enough to make these jaded old dudes get wood again.

Here’s Kenneth Turan, film critic of the Los Angeles Times, no less. He tells you this: The big-deal attack on Bin Laden’s compound AND all the hoo-hah about torture are (and I quote) “both overshadowed by the performance of Jessica Chastain. She [Chastain's character, Maya] is a force among forces, and Chastain makes her frankly thrilling to behold.” Chastain is not only Kenneth’s Playmate of the Year, she could be Playmate of His Career, “thrilling to behold”

Another geezer critic who dotes on Chastain is David Denby, of The New Yorker . His horny praises are so moving, I have to quote him in a poetical form (word-for-word, I swear):

“There is someone else

At that interrogation session:

An observer,

Who wears a black hood

And removes it

To shake out

A glorious curtain

Of reddish-gold hair.”

“A glorious curtain!” “Frankly thrilling to Behold!” And these guys are licensed Critics.

So far, then, the picture has two predominant advantages—Jessica and Osama. Beauty and the Beast. (And all those torture scenes, for your sado-masochistic friends.)

But is that enough to keep you sitting and eating your popcorn??? Let’s see. After Maya and her teacher Dan torture the Arab guy, they go to the dark, dusty CIA office in Wherever-abad. Now the picture starts to bog down again. You get a lot of bullshit office politics, uptight CIA bureaucrats with no balls, but with the power to fuck Chastain over. They don’t even seem to get that she is the hottest fucking White Woman in all of Kissmybuttistan.

So here you got male-pig office politics dragging down the pace of the chase. Then Chastain starts staring at torture videos. And you know these videos are “real” because they’re super-fuzzy. So: Office politics, torture videos, more office politics, more torture videos. Then, a terrorist attack they didn’t see coming, and more office politics (with more pressure—we gotta get those Terrorists before they strike again!) and more torture videos. The only thing worth watching is Chastain watching videos.

Finally, they catch a Big Fish, named Faraj. Now it’s Chastain’s turn. She gets to torture a guy all by herself, “One-on-one, with Faraj,” her boss says. And this is where you, sadly, begin to wonder if this All-American Beauty has any heavy-duty acting chops. (I LOVED her in “The Help,” but that was cute, funny light-weight stuff.) She has Faraj beaten up; she has Faraj water-boarded; she even has her torture-flunkies pour a thick brown stuff into a funnel that they stick down his throat. Eeeeeeew!

But Faraj is tough; he doesn’t squeal. So she uses more and more “measures” on him (but not on camera, sorry). She tells her mentor Dan that, “Faraj is still withholding, and that’s using every measure we have.” Finally she tortures him so bad, and so non-stop, that he dies of it. We know this because one of the women in the office says, casually, like she’s giving Chastain fashion tips, “So Faraj went south on you. It happens.”

And this is where, in spite of that glorious curtain of reddish-gold hair, and the perfect profile and the creamy spotless skin, Chastain is in WAY over her head.

It takes a certain kind of woman—a certain kind of person—to do what she (Maya/Chastain) does. Which is cold-blooded murder of the most hideous kind, murder by torture. The kind of person we’re talking about here is vicious, tough, cold, fanatical, ruthless and merciless. Charlise Theron could go that deep, Halle Berry could; but not Jessica Chastain.

After Chastain-as-Maya commits these heinous crimes, nothing changes. You don’t see it in her face, her attitude, the way she carries herself—nowhere. She just keeps truckin’ along, on that tricky trail of clues leading to the Trophy of All Trophies—Bin Laden in a body bag. Chastain’s idea of playing this demented CIA ghoul is to act like a college girl pulling all-nighters at final exam time. By God, she is going to get straight fucking “A”s, even if she has to skip her daily shampoo and tooth whitener.

Don’t get me wrong. Chastain is still beautiful—too beautiful, if you wanna know the truth—as the picture staggers along to the Big Shoot-out. But now it feels weird. We’re supposed to root, root, root for the home team and Maya, the under-rated short-stop. But something’s off.

You schlubs never read Picture of Dorian Grey, am I right? It’s a novel about a handsome young dude who does a lot of sick shit—gets down with depravity; messes people up, so they wanna kill themselves; drinks, does drugs and generally wastes himself—and still comes across as a handsome young dude! Meanwhile, up in his attic, he keeps a painting of himself that gets uglier and creepier and more disgusting with every evil deed he does.

Well, I wanna ask the director of this picture (Katherine Bigelow), Where is the secret “Picture of Jessica Chastain” that should be getting uglier and creepier, with every evil, torturing deed she does? Why don’t we see the Chastain whose soul is crawling with maggots???

Okay, maybe I’m nit-picking. We should move on. Fine. Only moving on doesn’t move fast enough. There’s more desk-top gumshoe “detective” work. Bullshit, bullshit, they find a picture of the errand boy that was lying in a CIA file somewhere, for only eight years, bullshit, bullshit, they follow the guy in the picture until he leads them to Mecca, the Holy Grail, the Wailing Wall of great detective movie “finds” of the Century! Osama Bin Bama’s home address!!!

Send in the SEALs, right??? Bang-bang, bing-bang. Wrap it up, roll the credits, right?

Oops, sorry, but you can’t punch out quite yet—not until we give you another blood-pounding hour of bureaucratic bullshit. Are you sure UBL is there? (The “U” is for “Usama,” which the uptight CIA refuses to call him anything but.) Are you REALLY sure? Well, we can’t torture anybody anymore, so we can’t REALLY be sure, but the Redhead says SHE’s sure. Blah, blah, blah, yak, yak, yak around the conference table.

Finally, the Director tells the President it LOOKS like UBL is REALLY there, so

unleash the SEALs! Takes about another half hour for the SEALs to get warmed up and then—uh-oh. Remember when it ACTUALLY went down, when it REALLY went down on CNN and CBS and NBC and MSNBC? The real deal was two choppers full of the most pumped-up, most weaponized adrenaline-heads, with night-vision apps up their butts VERSUS what? A tiny fraction of UBL’s Extended Family!

The real deal was like this: A full platoon of CRIPs and a full platoon of BLOODs with 30-round magazines in their assault rifles, unite together and bravely knock over a family candy store in Koreatown, Los Angeles, US of A.

And that’s the fucking climax of Zero Dark Thirty.

So how does Bigelow make you feel like all your waiting was not in vain. Well, first of all, she shoots everything all green and very fuzzy, like you’re seeing everything through the SEALs’ night vision goggles. Sometimes she even makes the screen go black, so “realistic,” like the goggles fritz out and the poor SEAL is as blind as all the people living in the big house. Black screen—SEALs whispering to each other—scary stuff very SUSPENSEFUL, so you won’t remember this was the easiest job any SEAL Team ever pulled since they first crawled up on shore, what—fifty years ago?

This is one hundred and fifty-seven minutes of your time. And what would this picture be, without Osama, without the high-wattage charisma of The Man in “The Greatest Manhunt in History”? Without “UBL,” you got three average-quality episodes of “Cold Case!” If you cut out all the digital gumshoe garbage, you got one better than-average episode. I’m telling you, the fucking Emperor is strutting around without a stitch on his fucking carcass!

And you blew $10 on this. Maybe more. Know who gets the Last Laff? You guessed it—ol’ Ozzy Bin Lozzy. Fucker transformed America like no politician or CEO could ever have done—turned it into one big Chicken Shack, ruled over by Giant Mutant Foxes. I swear he’s cackling in his watery grave.

[NOTE: “Uncle Ray Birney” is a pseudonym. Uncle Ray is an authority on any and all spectator sports, including the movies. He provides wisdom and erudition to his drinking buddies and to his and his wife's extended families. A veteran security guard, he has plenty of time to read and a license to carry a concealed firearm

-

[Johann]

ZERO DARK THIRTY isn't anywhere on my 2012 Best Lists because I saw it after making them up. But I don't mind leaving it off because I think it has been overrated by the critics, in general.
Viewers might do better watching Nick Broomfield's THE BATTLE FOR HADITHA. Americans need to learn how much the US has gotten everything wrong in their "war on terror" and no meticulous (or falsified) account of the hunt for Bin Laden is going to do much toward getting things right.

I think you nailed it right there Chris.
You got it down cold.
I have no desire whatsoever to see Zero Dark Thirty, with a fictional protagonist. (!)

[Chris Knipp]

Uncle Ray Birney also nailed, and I thought that was pretty much what you'd have written, Johann, if you'd seen the movie and wanted to go into detail on it.

[Johann]

I enjoyed Uncle Ray's review. He's got my style of indignation.

BTW, the 70mm 2001 and Vertigo screenings have been delayed. The prints are in Chicago for a 70mm festival this weekend. I don't know when they will be back up North. The screenings in March are regular 35mm. I'll probably go to 2001 but wait for vertigo to return.
(And Lawrence of Arabia- another 70mm Beaut.)

[Johann]

Would you believe I've only seen 2 Kubrick films on the big screen?
A Clockwork Orange- in Vancouver, the UNCUT Clockwork to boot...
and
Eyes Wide Shut-Edmonton (WEM) opening day.

[Chris Knipp]

I've seen everything he made after THE KILLING on the big screen except SPARTACUS and BARRY LYNDON. There was so much negative criticism of BARRY LYNDON it discouraged me, and then on video was a mistake because it is to me for its visuals that it is important, and I didnt get the full effect of those. They're all wonderful in their way but 2001 was the most extraordinary and trippy experience. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was extremely intense in a great way. THE SHINING was really disturbing. Seeing a film by Kubrick on the big screen was always an event to remember and talk about.

1999 Eyes Wide Shut

1987 Full Metal Jacket

1980 The Shining

1975 Barry Lyndon

1971 A Clockwork Orange

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey

1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1962 Lolita

1960 Spartacus

1957 Paths of Glory

[Johann]

I'm waiting for a retrospective that can blow my mind. Toronto should be able to mount it sometime...
Seeing them the way they were meant to be seen means a lot to me.

[Chris Knipp]

Absolutely. Several of them are among the most visually striking movies I've ever feasted my eyes on. I still haven't seen BARRY LYNDON that way.

[oscar jubis]

For what it's worth... at such a late point in the reception of 0Dark30, my reaction after a viewing in a theater is...
what's all the fuss and buzz about?
There is nothing in the film that merits the bitter ideological criticism against it. Like Dargis states in her NYT review, the ending is "emphatically nontriumphant" and to omit the scenes showing coercive interrogation techniques or torture would be reprehensible and cowardly. I think of Zero Dark Thirty as falling squarely within the genre (or sub-genre) of the procedural. The film basically and expertly guides you through the process of locating and eliminating a man who forfeited his humanity and eventually got what he deserved. That is all there is, and there is no more. The film is also a work of fiction that takes some artistic licenses that I have no compelling reason to criticize. So what if the protagonist plays a bigger role here than her real life counterpart?

[Chris Knipp]

Those few lines you have deposited above may satisfy you, after "all the fuss and buzz"; they won't satisfy those of use who have engaged in the debate. You override most of the points of the debate. I would draw your attention to Tarak Barkawi's recent article on ZD30 (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132191730802965.html)for Al Jazeera English. His points, some of them:

According to the film, CIA torture was essential to the finding of Bin Laden. This assertion pleases conservative talk show hosts. Liberal commentators are appaled that the film ignores facts noted by congressmen with access to all the classified documents that dispute the assertion. Yet you see no reason to criticize the "drastic" liberties taken with history, despite the filmmakers' claims that they did not.*

Bigelow and Boal have asserted or implied that the film is historical. The film itself begins with the claim that it is “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events." Whether or not this is true, Americans, sadly, do learn their history from Hollywood movies. ZD30 is an effort to put a happy ending to the "War on Terror." This happy ending is that (quoting you, Oscar)," The film basically and expertly guides you through the process of locating and eliminating a man who forfeited his humanity and eventually got what he deserved." Hollywood propaganda determines how Americans see wars and is largely responsible for WWII's being seen now as "the good war," the just and right one. Hollywood mostly has made liberals the wrongdoers in the Vietnam War.

Barkawi has an interesting comparison with John Wayne's film THE GREEN BERETS It misconstrues the nature of the Vietnam War, but it does at least come out strongly against torture and assassination. THE GREEN BERETS anticipates the terrible consequences of openly following the policies of torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, rendition, and endless detention carried out since 9/11 by Bush and continued by the Obama administration, consequences for the US military in future wars whose country now has chosen no longer to set a higher moral standard than its enemies.

The killing of Bin Laden shown in ZD30 is more or less a grandiose example of Obama's "targeted assassinations" by drone: it's just an unusually time-consuming and super-costly one. ZD30, despite its "emphatically nontriumphant" ending (Dargis' naive misreading, which you accept), is designed to accept the validity of torture as an information-gathering necessity and targeted assassination as a triumphant outcome, making a decade of violence, destruction, and waste worthwhile.
What ZD30 registers and tries to make normal is a US that publically acknowledges and supports the torture, assassination and kidnapping of terrorist suspects. It is a US comfortable with the idea that to avenge its 3,000 dead on 9/11, two countries could be invaded and wars started in which hundreds of thousands died, as long as bin Laden was gotten in the end. And it is a US at ease with the prospect that its robotic aerial assassins can fly anywhere, anytime to deal out death with impunity, even to US citizens.

Whatever their intentions, Bigelow and Boal have become troopers in the War on Terror. It is up to the rest of us to seek our history elsewhere than in Hollywood.
--Tarak Barkawi.
Yet you see "nothing in the film that merits the bitter ideological criticism against it. . . . That is all there is, and there is no more."

There is a hell of a lot more, but you choose not to see it.

In finding no reason to "fuss" about ZD30 with its torture-to-victory trajectory, you put yourself in the same box as John Woo, who originally proposed throwing out the Geneva Convention, and who praises Obama for the killing of Bin Laden and continues to tout the benefits of torture in a Reuters opinion piece. (http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/09/07/the-cost-of-killing-osama-bin-laden/) If criticism of the film is "ideological," then so is acceptance of it without question or "fuss."

_____________________
*A December article in Salon.com by Natasha Lenard, "How true is “ZD30″? (http://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/fact_checking_zero_dark_thirtys_almost_journalism/)", considers in much more detail where the film strays from the known facts and how much Boal and Bigelow have implied in interviews that it does not. She notes, as have others, that the torture scenes make a more exciting movie than the endless sifting through files of CIA "flacks" that constituted the main work that led to the courier that led to Bin Laden. Bigelow is an "action film" director. This relatively mediocre effort (despite some moments of good technique in conveying explosions) is limited by her inability to make investigation interesting, as, for example, David Fincher arguably does in ZODIAC and SE7EN. The film is not only politically dubious and morally reprehensible and factually misleading, but artistically unsuccessful as a handling of the "procedural."

[tabuno]

I didn't get the idea that torture was necessarily required to obtain crucial information in this movie, in fact the opposite. I assume that those that do have a problem are viewing this movie through liberal filters that are overly sensitive when it comes to watching movies such as these that a defensive, negative reaction takes over and blots out the more balanced viewing that we others experienced in this movie.

Those purists insisting of documentary integrity seem to have blurred the line of art and dramatic film-making and set an unreachable standard of for any artistic, dramatic representation of reality based on history. They either ignore the importance of editing and dramatic presentation for the purpose of highlighting and not boring the audience. To turn this movie into a political extreme commentary of right and wrong and propaganda is to degrade the inspirational experience of human trials and pain and courage demonstrated in this movie. It seems that this movie has succeeded in the derivative purpose in creating a firestorm of political discussion as a byproduct and which offers additional evidence that this movie in addition to being well done and deserving of Best Picture just because it has been able to bring out just this type of discussion.

[Chris Knipp]

That is all absolute nonsense. First of all the film and its makers make claims to being historical and have continued to since its release. Second the information is clearly implanted in the film in an unmistakable narrative thread that a single man who had been tortured was tricked into giving the crucial information after the torture by being told that he had already revealed it when he was semi-conscious. Third ZD30 is unmistakably ideological, but this question of its validity is not a matter of ideology. And I am not a "liberal." The issues are ones of fact, of morality, and of aesthetics (film quality), not of politics and ideology. Of course if you are on the side of John Woo and therefore advocate the use of torture in all the illegal post-9/11 incarcerations, tortures, and renditions, maybe you qualify as a "conservative." But Senator John McCain is a Republican and a conservative and he is against torture. He knows as others do that if the US does not follow the Geneva Convention and its own Universal Code of Miitary Justice (in its traditional form) then Americans cannot expect to be treated fairly in combat situations either. ZD30 is a propaganda film: that is what Barkawi shows. It's contemporary, sly, sophisticated, not the propaganda film of earlier, more naive days. But it's a propaganda film. I see that now.

I am, I repeat, not a liberal. I never watch a movie through liberal filters. I look for fact, accuracy, truth to culture, language, history -- areas where Hollywood almost invariably fails. ZERO DARK THIRTY is no different. It has been enormously overrated. Kathryn Bigelow is a talented action filmmaker. BEFORE DARK and POINT BREAK are incredibly cool, original, engaging films. THE HURT LOCKER was knuckle-headed, but also incredibly intense and involving. She has now gone over the deep end -- into ideology. And into events we need to wait a while to view with more detachment. You can't dodge these issues by saying this is "just a story" or "just a movie" or "just (God help us) entertainment." There is every reason for there to be fuss.

[tabuno]

To water down and to avoid such torture scenes in a movie such as this would be to ignore history. Such requirements as Chris is demanding for a movie to a aesthetic to define quality would be to verge of having a World War II film and to believe like the Iranians that the Holocaust never occurred.

Most of the film world and those that offered their professional opinion of this film's quality being considered the best or nominated for the best film by major film awards around the country would suggest that Chris may have overlooked a more basic quality film criteria than most others have. He is definitely on the side of the minority on this movie.

[Chris Knipp]

Again you are missing the point. No one is suggesting the film ought to have avoided showing torture. What was wrong in the film's use of torture is that it is falsely (and also deviously and indirectly) indicated to have been how the key information was acquired. Besides that it was heavily emphasized by having long sequences of it early in the film to make a big splash and create excitement. Meanwhile the complex details of CIA in-house data-sorting that was the real way the target was located are given short shrift in favor of the lady with the long red mane bravely confronting her superiors and being around places where explosions dramatically occur. So much for the 'realistic' and 'procedural' movie.

The high critical rating astonishes me. This is perhaps the most overrated film of the decade. I think I can figure out why. It is triumphalist and propagandistic but it camaflages that with the appearance of being low-keyed and non-triumphalist. That allows Americans happily to have their political cake and eat it too. Manohla Dargis and others, already impressed by Bigelow's virtuosity in THE HURT LOCKER, were delighted to be deceived so skillfully. They were excited by this triumph of deception, even though ZD30 is, basically, a dull picture by Bigelow's standards and less intense than her previous film.

I'm very happy to side with the majority when it's right and equally happy to side with the minority when it's right. I might point out that in his review, Roger Ebert, the dean of US film critics and the most visible and famous one, rates ZD30 lower according to Metacritic -- 75 -- than I would. He make is sound interesting though he doesn't describe the movie I saw. But he also says it's "not great filmmaking," and says of the final Navy Seals sequence, "to paraphrase the MGM slogan, 'That's not entertainment.'" The Slant reviewer, in a similar vein, suggests that Biglelow is hamstrung by the factual material (even though Boal distorts key elements of it), and she cannot fly free (as she does in POINT BREAK, even relatively does in THE HURT LOCKER); the constraints keep her from making the good action movie she is, or at least used to be, capable of.

But to get back to the moral and political issue of how the film represents torture, I'll quote Peter Rainer, the well-known film critic of the Christian Science Monitor:
Peter Rainer
Dec 14, 2012
Metacritic rating: 58
By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

Let me repeat and try to explain to you that the reason why we say these things is that this is a film about a significant current event, one of the most notable actions carried out during the Obama regime. It's not "just a movie."