Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

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.

lol

oh good Taibbi is here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/zero-dark-thirty-is-osama-bin-ladens-last-victory-over-america-20130116

haha

His take on the movie itself is pretty otm, IMO.

How in hell are people cheering at the raid sequence?

I know the last shot is ambiguous and maybe I'm over reading it but it really stuck me as a pretty classic "the searchers" type of ending (ie, the hero and civilized of the frontier is also banished from it, he's "gone indian," and all that stuff.) and that maya is a sort of (clumsy) stand in for the general madness of post 9-11 America. This is an end of empire kind of thing--becoming "other" as I said above. I dunno, I just think this movie is far more pessimistic about the good ole USA than it may seem to it's detractors.

That's what I meant when I said you take out what you bring in. As someone who is anti-torture, anti-the nebulous "War on Terror", anti-infinite detention, thought the killing of UBL was meaningless and was generally a bit queasy at the WOO-HOO WE KILLED A DUDE response to the news of the raid, I saw it as a tale of moral decay and tunnel-vision to the point of obsession. The raid sequence sort of confirmed that for me with it's cold, tactical "let's watch these men work" style that had no problem showing the stomach-churning but probably real practice of shooting bullets into a corpse "just to make sure", especially with the kids right there. The killing of UBL was such a quick blurry flash that for me it felt like "well that's that then" moment as opposed to a "HOORAY". I don't see how people got excited for it but that's because I went in with the mindset I have. If you think that the endgame was worth it, you're gonna see the torture and maybe cringe but deem it necessary or you're going to think "these are bad guys fuck yeah USA" and boy wasn't it all worth it that Maya was a loose cannon obsessed with completing the mission.

i agree completely ryan. otoh 'the searchers' kind of works that way too -- i doubt many ppl in the original audience left the theater thinking 'that was a really intense study of american racism!'

UBL's death is over with so fast and it's shot in such an anticlimactic way that i have a hard time imagining anyone actually going nuts at it, it doesn't exactly give any 'this is where you cheer' cues to the audience, but i think there was pretty much no way to film that scene without getting that response.

Would John Ford have written an op ed

i do think it's fair to say the movie is perhaps confused and takes certain things for granted, and perhaps even KB isn't in total control of it, but to me that's interesting and not really a flaw as such. but that's just for me personally and not really any objective statement on it's worth.

ever since i had to stop seeing revivals of older films because of people laughing at anything that made them uncomfortable i've done my best it tune out how the rest of the audience is reacting to things.

I don't think The Searchers is all that good

well, you think the same of Frank Ocean.

it's a bad religion

Steve Coll in the new NYROB:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/?pagination=false

http://halfaballoon.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/data-points/

don't feel like arguing the facts right now but as cinema I was disappointed in how conventional it was. centering the whole story on one character, the higher-ups who are skeptical and don't believe her, the guy screaming at them and slamming his hand on the table about doing their f***ing jobs, she becomes close to this other agent who you know is about to get killed because that's what happens in the movies. I don't know why they had to fit what must be a lot of complicated and fascinating material into this narrative that's been done so many times before.

did some review of this mention The Searchers? I just got a copy of it from Netflix a few days ago and was completely surprised, I couldn't remember why in the world it was at the top of the queue

As I told my friend as we left the theatre, "Kyle Chandler's face was basically screaming 'YOU'RE A LOOSE CANNON, MAYA!' at one point."

Don't know if reviews have mentioned The Searchers, but it was mentioned here because of its ambiguous ending in regards to "heroism" and what is morally right.

Weird. I hadn't read this thread until today. I've never watched Westerns (except Leone, Corbucci of course). I have no idea what I was thinking when I bumped it up to #1 on the next DVD list.

Zero Dark Thirty didn't seem to be aiming for morally ambiguous, I thought it was a very very familiar narrative in which our heroine is doubted by everyone and has to fight her bosses and loses a close friend which is extra inspiration or something and of course she is right and persistent enough to get the bad guy in the end. And you can make it look gritty and realistic with the way it's filmed, but it still came off to me as so Hollywood and not challenging in the least! There are moments that I suppose are meant to make you think more than that, but the overall (again, super super conventional) plot had the effect of overwhelming them. I'm not too interested in Homeland for the same reasons

Well you'll certainly find a number on this thread that will agree with you. It's certainly a genre film, but I think the salience of The Searchers comparison is that it hangs its narrative on something conventional but conveys (to some, including me) something else. What better way to explore notions of heroism than by putting forth a conventional heroic narrative?

I mean I guess she could have made an anti-genre film a la Haywire or Killing them Softly or Not Fade Away, but then people would probably dismiss it out of hand as they did those films.

Though I should add I don't think KB intended to make an anti-CIA film, but I think she intended to throw up ambiguity by presenting it as "objectively" as possible.

Though as we all know, artistic intention is irrelevant.

I don't think The Searchers is all that good

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's ok if you remove every scene that's indoors

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e189/RollTideTA/teo.gif

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2028103/teo_medium.gif

http://i.imgur.com/w2AC9.png

http://i.imgur.com/Gpuj2.png

ahhh shit... wrong thread

sorry every1... ha ha

lmao

centering the whole story on manti te'o, the higher-ups who are skeptical and don't believe him, the website screaming at them and slamming its hand on the table about doing their f***ing jobs, he becomes close to this other football player who you know is making up a fake woman for him to date because that's what happens in the movies.

I've never watched Westerns (except Leone, Corbucci of course).

OF COURSE grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr