Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

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"

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.

Absolutely none of this in any way has anything to do with the killing of UBL as being an important event.

If it didn't prevent future attacks, and served no purpose than revenge, how so?

(unless it was important bcz it filled a weeklong news cycle)

Because we basically started a war to kill him? Because he was the face of 9/11?

wrong reasons, i would argue. (that war isn't over btw and several of our freedoms are likely gone forever)

sort of like Javier Bardem in Skyfall.... bin Laden won.

being mad a movie for being squarely within mainstream american opinion about its subject seems both right on and totally pointless

i agree with you, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't an important or significant event. xpost

the message i got from the end of the film was that it wasn't really worth it, or that the cost was horrendous even if it was worth it -- that spending a decade of your life entirely focused on killing somebody fucks you up. maya spends a decade of her life on this, loses her (apparently only) friend, abandons having any kind of personal life, and all so they could break into a house and shoot an old man in the face. plus kill some innocent people and terrorize some children.

eh... hard to call the people who were living with and sheltering Osama "innocent people."

I think you're reading a shit-ton of your views into the ending. You could just as easily say that Maya cries with relief after accomplishing the mission she believes she was allowed to live to do. (she says this explicitly, it stops just short of God's Will)

Maya's idea, of course, was to just bomb the shit out of the complex, killing those 'innocent people' AND children together. I don't think she was crying at the courier or Osama's son getting shot.

I read the ending as much closer to milo's tho w/ Chastain's limits who can tell.

i don't think the ending of the film said much about whether it was "worth it". to me the ending wants you to ask how you would feel if you were obsessed with something for 10 years and then one night it was just suddenly done. she's alone in this massive plane, the pilot asks her where she wants to go and instead of answering him she just sits down and cries. i think it asks a human question instead of a political one.

the human is suposed to function as a metaphor for the political in this case tho, was it worth it to us as a nation how to we feel about our murderous obsession and so forth

If the question is that small, J0rdan, then I don't fucking care.

was it worth it to us as a nation how to we feel about our murderous obsession and so forth

The answer to this seems pretty simple on the macro scale. (Note: still haven't watched this one.)

If the question is that small, J0rdan, then I don't fucking care.

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean if this is just suposed to be a story abt this lady she is sad and not that interesting

in a way it reminds me of the social network in that a creative team took on a TRUE STORY and turned into the most in-character docudrama, to the point of ignoring any elements of the story that don't hook the the creative team's traditional subject matter - but everyone gives it zeitgeist points for being the TRUE STORY. Ironically, I like your average Bigelow movie way more than your average Fincher/Sorkin movie, but if Sorkin putting big speeches into actors mouths and saying it's the story of facebook was more entertaining for me than bigelow doing another glum quest and calling it the story of how we caught ubl - esp since the TRUE STORY element is used to excuse a relative lack of character detail

murderous obsession is what made America great