Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

Close! Alexandria, Virginia. Highest was near Langley. Second highest in Fairfax County, VA.

it must be pretty sweet to be the guy who killed ubl, are you allowed to tell, i would tell everyone

― lag∞n, Monday, January 14, 2013 3:04 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol srs but I recall from some writeup of events (think the journo had some access to the SEAL team) that they totally know who but are definitely not going to disclose.

was Obama, who flew in disguise w/ sunglasses and a Chicago Bears hat iirc

really...undecided on this. it was never boring and i can't really imagine any decent human being watching the raid sequence, much less the torture sequences, and not feeling troubled and nauseated. even bin laden's killing isn't played like a 'way to go!' movie moment -- it's messy and confused and the aftermath is ugly and unpleasant, not triumphant. i saw it in a near-empty theater, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone cheering at that scene.

otoh the movie doesn't really give you much reason not to think 'they tortured some ppl, and that eventually somehow helped them get bin laden.'

this was so, so good

the only reaction in my showing was a round of cackling when the soldier was beckoning bin laden: "osama?"

the torture aspect of this is so ridiculously overblown that i'm even more embarrassed for political media than normal

I dunno, it's hard to walk away from the movie with any message but "torture brought together all the pieces that landed Osama."

I think it would have been better if we never saw DEVGRU and the actual attack, just follow her as she watches it in real-time. Something about 3/4 procedural 1/4 action movie was off-putting.

there was this one scene where they they just fucking laid his nuts on a fucking dresser, just his nuts laying on a fucking dresser, and bang them shits with a spiked fucking bat, blaow

I dunno, it's hard to walk away from the movie with any message but "torture brought together all the pieces that landed Osama."

the movie definitely sees her as heroic but this isn't like old "24"-style typical torture depiction in films or movies where a bad guy finally spurts out an answer after having his nipples shocked. the movie shows one name popping up routinely during "interrogations" and from there a little morsel of information is used to find something bigger. to me there was a subtext of both inefficiency and luck involved with the torture aspect. i also thought the scenes were brutal to watch and not forgiving in any way. imo you have to be very narrow-minded to come away from that thinking "hey, torture works!" of course i'm sure people did but that's not bigelow's or boal's responsibility imo.

I think it would have been better if we never saw DEVGRU and the actual attack, just follow her as she watches it in real-time. Something about 3/4 procedural 1/4 action movie was off-putting.

i could see that but i also thought the raid of the house was shot strikingly well

Not the torture scenes themselves but the dialogue - talking about how all the info they're working on until the last guy who tips them to the courier came directly from detainees who'd been tortured, and even the last guy IIRC says he doesn't want to be tortured again.

It doesn't glorify torture, but the case being made was, to me, that torture works in getting good information.

The torture scenes themselves were not particularly brutal, IMO - there was little visceral feel for the horrors of waterboarding or, um, hot-boxing.

idk I kind of wanted to die, what movies have you been watching

i thought they were pretty hard to watch, but i can't sit through most horror movies. maya's clearly the stand-in for the viewer -- standing off to the side and wincing, not seeing the worst details but hearing everything.

Not the torture scenes themselves but the dialogue - talking about how all the info they're working on until the last guy who tips them to the courier came directly from detainees who'd been tortured, and even the last guy IIRC says he doesn't want to be tortured again.

yeah this is definitely noticeable -- she makes it explicit in her briefing of the seal team -- but if anything that's to me a reflection of the beliefs of people inside the CIA. i believe that a lot of people inside the CIA especially ones that worked under bush think torture works!

well why wouldnt they believe it, they used it and it worked

hey man it only got them a lil info, thats not like working, its not like they were after info

it would be a really weird conclusion to think that torture worked just based on the fact that guys didnt want to tell them stuff and then after being tortured they told them stuff

and not once was the stuff untrue

well that doesn't really happen in the movie but okay

yes it absolutely does

multiple times

torture torture torture, stare at walls, write on windows, go to meetings, yell at boss, for a movie about an investigation it was kind of an odd depiction of one, half an hour of in depth torture then a lot of office politics

tbh that's kind of how i already pictured life in the cia

lag∞n right, J0rdan wrong, millennium approacheth

morbs recognizes righteousness, millennium was like ten years ago

had the chance to watch it last weekend, but I'm squeamish these days about even killing roaches.

Liz Cheney ‏@Liz_Cheney
Just saw Zero Dark Thirty. Excellent film about years of heroism, including in the enhanced interrogation program, that led to bin Laden.

heh

it's a biblical thing, j0e

xxp

maybe Liz saw it w/ J0rdan?

ya i know i was just making a lil joke

I would borrow all the money I can for a movie date with Liz Cheney and J0rdan

Michael Sicinski:

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost. In practical terms, bin Laden had long since been sidelined in the daily activities of al Qaeda, so his assassination was a function of closure. Yet while pundits and politicians get wrapped up in whether the film "defends" torture as the means to taking him out, by and large they are failing to examine Bigelow's filmmaking as a rhetorical method and as a symbolic form.

Many film critics and intellectuals love Kathryn Bigelow because she used to be a painter and has avant-garde credentials, and as action filmmakers go she certainly has a better-than-average command of cinematic space. The fact that she has recently turned to military subjects is not all that surprising. High-tech reconnaissance devices are the endpoint of Renaissance perspective and its abstraction of lived space into mappable patterns and fields.

Nevertheless, her storytelling tends to exhibit a fascination with power, particularly male power, from an objective distance. On the one hand, ZDT is a kind of blank slate, much like Maya: content to show certain things that happened, without ever asking about their meaning or providing much of a contextual framework. But the forms of action filmmaking inevitably provide their own inherent explanation.

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/zero-dark-thirty-tortures-not-the-most-troubling-thing-about-kathryn-bigelows-hollywood-death-strike/Content?oid=3220637

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost.

i dont know that this is true!

High-tech reconnaissance devices are the endpoint of Renaissance perspective and its abstraction of lived space into mappable patterns and fields.

though this is a cool idea

film critics love Bigelow because she made Near Dark and Point Break, not because she was a painter. How daft.

also she was a fighter pilot

and a woman

"and intellectuals," Alfred

i need to see this again before making any strong claims because so much of what i think about what it's trying to do are because of how it made me feel. i walked out in a gloomy funk and stayed that way.

in any case. i agree with Sicinski that certain action movie logics override and control the movie to an extent. but short of getting avant garde not sure KB could have tried to push back against them any more than she did. but that tension is what's fascinating! the machine pulls on but there's a dark fatalism to it.

as i said above, i think this movie is engaging some pretty broad and mythical american archetypes (a la Richard Slotkin) about becoming "other" and the like. and i think it does so in a really compelling way.

max, I recall that soon after the bin Laden hit, B & B announced that their film project, previously slated to be about the 'near miss' at Tora Bora, would be about the successful end to the manhunt. Some objections were raised (by whom I don't recall) that they'd be 'glorifying' this as some great event, and one or the other of them replied, to paraphrase, that it was of course a significant and important event. So that seemed to indicate that they think it was "worth it," no matter what.

i dunno. i need to see it again -- i just cant really shake the ending, which was so gloomy and dark and anticlimactic that it made me think that youre supposed to walk away with "was this really worth it?" in the back of your mind

Yeah me too. It's like "let's make an action movie that rather than be exhilarating haunts you with a nameless dread and moral complicity."

How is killing Bin Laden not an important or significant event? Xpost

Sean Hannity loved it!

Gukbe, per the Sicinski line that reflects what I've read in innumerable places: "In practical terms, bin Laden had long since been sidelined in the daily activities of al Qaeda, so his assassination was a function of closure."

Justice required a trial.

i dunno. i need to see it again -- i just cant really shake the ending, which was so gloomy and dark and anticlimactic that it made me think that youre supposed to walk away with "was this really worth it?" in the back of your mind

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its definitely suposed to be ambiguous, as to whether it accomplishes that idk, kinda feel like the movie is an incoherent mess and really not very good as a movie which is then compound by the weird ahistorical torture featurette prequel

the feelings of dissatisfaction and bewilderment a lot of zdt boosters are crediting to the artistry of the film can really be more easily explained by the fact that its comprised of a bunch of gross stuff poorly stitched together

"let's make an action movie that rather than be exhilarating haunts you with a nameless dread and moral complicity."

seriously have you guys ever seen a kathryn bigelow movie before this

I still really want to see this

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost.

again i think the subtext of the film goads you into calling this idea into question. one of the crucial scenes in the movie the part where her boss refuses to give her some money or men or w/e and she goes "you're gonna be the first CIA bureau chief called before congress to testify as to why you let osama bin laden get away" or whatever, and to me the take away from that is pity for her boss who falls for a ploy so obvious and stupid. i also think the tension in the scenes where they're outside searching for the courier is "a lot of people inside the CIA think this is a worthless mission, so we better find this dude quickly before we get shut down"