Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

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.

"yes torture happened, but good americans got the bad guy" may not be "pro-torture" but it sure ain't anti

of course it can! But certain soldiers take away different things from it than might have been intended, or they can ignore the anti-war aspects and just think it's about badass marines being badass.

it doesn't need to be "anti-torture", does it? xpost

A lot of soldiers ARE anti-war.

the Jarhead guy wrote that no film is antiwar, cuz it will excite young men as long as it shows action.

don't really buy that but i get the point

there was also a montage bit that shows Maya callously waterboarding a dude and we don't know what came of that. xposts

Yes they are Eric, but not all of them. xpost

the Jarhead guy wrote that no film is antiwar, cuz it will excite young men as long as it shows action.

i've heard this argument from an ex-addict re: anti-drug movies too

it's silly to be "how can you think this is pro-torture" when a film shows people we're supposed to be grateful to committing torture and then killing the bad guy. Yes, it's more artful than a 24 episode, but why should anyone have to be grateful for a film that grudgingly accepts conventional wisdom on us foreign policy.

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.

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:03 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh come on that was a mistake not a lie

I don't think it expects us to be grateful for committing torture and killing the bad guy. xpost

read bigelow's op-ed again

By this measure, Spiritual Voices must count as the most anti-war "war movie" ever.

I read it. I linked it!

A lot of soldiers ARE anti-war.

I got on a bus a few months back which was idle for 10 minutes before it pulled out. A grizzled passenger chatted with the driver, who revealed he'd been in the Marines for 17 (?) years. The passenger got up and said "I hear all the time that no one says thank you -- THANK YOU," shakes the driver's hand, and the driver looks like he wants to disappear under his seat. Then the driver says, "Thanks, but when it comes to killing people ... you've got to have a good reason. And... OIL?"

War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

In that vein, we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security.

Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

The party line of the movie is that torture always led to good intelligence.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:06 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya it fits neatly into the hard eyed realist party line that there are bad people out there and sometimes you need people on yr side willing to do the things you cant so that you can maintain yr illusion of safety and moral superiority, not saying thats what they were trying to say but its not hard to fit it into that box

I really think this is a movie where you take out what you bring into it.

sounds like a shitty movie then

zzzz

i mean a news article about the killing of ubl can pull that off

you should probably not see it

no, seriously, what's impressive about a movie that tells the story of how ubl was killed and everyone walks out feeling the same way about it they did coming in

it's an artful expression of conventional wisdom

I never said it was impressive.

if you want to see a kathryn bigelow movie about a woman's struggle to stop a murderous madman in the face of a patriarchal bureaucracy, i recommend this one where SHIT BE POPPING OFF and nobody pretends it's a true story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJTOmShc9E0

I got on a bus a few months back which was idle for 10 minutes before it pulled out. A grizzled passenger chatted with the driver, who revealed he'd been in the Marines for 17 (?) years. The passenger got up and said "I hear all the time that no one says thank you -- THANK YOU," shakes the driver's hand, and the driver looks like he wants to disappear under his seat. Then the driver says, "Thanks, but when it comes to killing people ... you've got to have a good reason. And... OIL?"

Maybe if the driver hadn't let the bus idle for 10 minutes, he could've stopped the next war.