Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

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

otm xp

are there any zdt ravers coming from the perspective of "hot damn i love me some kathryn bigelow movies?" for all the "judge it as a movie" defenses out there, i don't really see people dealing with it from any kind of auteurist perspective

You could just as easily say that Maya cries with relief after accomplishing the mission she believes she was allowed to live to do.

i agree -- i don't think she's crying because she feels bad about what she's done and i don't think the film is saying 'getting UBL was bad,' but i definitely don't get any sense of triumph out of that scene, or really out of the entire last half-hour of the movie. the underlying theme of the film seems to be that the hunt for the ultimate bad guy kinda turned us into bad guys ourselves -- i mean, this is a film that begins with the 'heroes' brutally torturing someone.

she just had a lot of stuff bottled up

Brutally torturing someone who was presented, unequivocally, as an important al-Qaeda link.
None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

I don't see that as a problem.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116,0,5937785.story

as far as the verisimilitude of the whole torture scenario it completely ignored the prime practical issue w/torture which is people lie, like they dont hold back for days saying nothing until finally you beat it out of them like is portrayed in every movie ever including this one, when you start to hurt them they just say stuff that will hopefully make you stop whether its true or not

so all moral objections aside this was a v typical hollywood presentation

could do without the self-congratulatory Hollywood twaddle

This is the second time she says "depiction is not endorsement." No one has made this argument...?

Actually they have. Many many times.

i like how all the praised nuance and ambiguity of the film morphs into an italicized "sometimes" at the end of an op-ed

the smart critiques haven't. xp

even Greenwald hasn't said this

"sometimes lines were crossed but never forget the bravery," in theaters now.

None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:52 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is true. it probably could have been remedied but the scope of this movie is pretty narrow that i'm not sure from a filmmaking perspective that it would've made sense to create an innocent prisoner.

as far as the verisimilitude of the whole torture scenario it completely ignored the prime practical issue w/torture which is people lie, like they dont hold back for days saying nothing until finally you beat it out of them like is portrayed in every movie ever including this one, when you start to hurt them they just say stuff that will hopefully make you stop whether its true or not

they do get wrong intel at one point, though, when during one interrogation a guy says that he buried the courier. another crucial part of the film.

Guk, do you think ZDT critics would say Kubrick favored executing soldiers picked at random from a retreating battalion, because Paths of Glory depicted it?

Of course not. That doesn't mean others have made the criticism (not smartly, mind) that by showing torture and suggesting it might have worked is an endorsement.

But it's funny you bring up Kubrick, as I was just now watching Full Metal Jacket, a film that reeks of anti-war to me, and yet it's hugely popular amongst soldiers.

None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:52 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

then again, i think there's an ambiguity to the interrogations that clouds the air. with the first detainee that we see -- who is also the one that gets brutalized the worst -- the interrogators throw out a bunch of "facts" that also aren't proven to be true. they're shown lying to him (or bluffing him), and i don't get the sense that you're supposed to explicitly believe that the interrogators are telling the truth.

a film can be popular among soldiers and anti-war!

I get the decision from a story perspective, but if you want to be less than pro-torture, maybe show one of the dozens of people Maya and her boss tortured who didn't have any info? Or at least allude to it?
The party line of the movie is that torture always led to good intelligence.