Zero Dark Review
Jan. 13th, 2013 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So this weekend I went to see Zero Dark Thirty. There's been a fair amount of controversy over this film which is a fictionalized account of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (they had to re-do some of the movie once he was actually killed and the last 30-45 minutes is the actual compound assault). So here are the main points.
1.) Yes, there are a couple of scenes were US interrogators torture people. This was not nearly as bad as it could have been. I didn't feel they glorified the torture at all. Most importantly no real intelligence was gleaned through this process.
2.) The movie pretty much fails at being a good movie, but succeeds wildly at being a good movie to make you talk about the movie and its subject a lot afterwords (such as torture and it's use/non-use in these situations). The action sequence is pretty tame for the most part -- this is a story of mind-numbingly boring intelligence analysis, and probably the most exciting stuff in the actual hunt wouldn't be made available to the film makers for security reasons. So it's a procedural where you don't see most of the procedure. The case stretched on for 10 years so the movie skips forward in time. We don't find out too much about any of the characters. If this movie had been made before 9/11 it would've been a vague, incoherent mess. But if you've lived through the past 10 years you walk out of the theater and start talking about everything that happened and that's kind of awesome -- have supper after the show not before if you can.
3.) I felt like the unspoken catchphrase of the movie was "That girl's got a lot of moxie. Give her what she wants." The lead investigator, Maya, (played by Jessica Chastain) would be the lone wolf cop in most 70's action pictures. I half expected her superiors to demand that she turn in her badge several times. The fact that they didn't, the fact that a relatively junior analyst was sent to spearhead this investigation is one of those interesting facts that you'd like to find out more about but which the movie never addresses. Still, Maya gets what she wants and it's fun to see that play out.
4.) Speaking of which, if it's true the lead investigator in the actual hunt was a woman, that's kind of awesome. There are actually a couple of really great female roles in this (passes the Bechdel Test even).
So yeah. I think it's a movie worth seeing, but not for the film itself but for talking about it later.
Tom
So this weekend I went to see Zero Dark Thirty. There's been a fair amount of controversy over this film which is a fictionalized account of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (they had to re-do some of the movie once he was actually killed and the last 30-45 minutes is the actual compound assault). So here are the main points.
1.) Yes, there are a couple of scenes were US interrogators torture people. This was not nearly as bad as it could have been. I didn't feel they glorified the torture at all. Most importantly no real intelligence was gleaned through this process.
2.) The movie pretty much fails at being a good movie, but succeeds wildly at being a good movie to make you talk about the movie and its subject a lot afterwords (such as torture and it's use/non-use in these situations). The action sequence is pretty tame for the most part -- this is a story of mind-numbingly boring intelligence analysis, and probably the most exciting stuff in the actual hunt wouldn't be made available to the film makers for security reasons. So it's a procedural where you don't see most of the procedure. The case stretched on for 10 years so the movie skips forward in time. We don't find out too much about any of the characters. If this movie had been made before 9/11 it would've been a vague, incoherent mess. But if you've lived through the past 10 years you walk out of the theater and start talking about everything that happened and that's kind of awesome -- have supper after the show not before if you can.
3.) I felt like the unspoken catchphrase of the movie was "That girl's got a lot of moxie. Give her what she wants." The lead investigator, Maya, (played by Jessica Chastain) would be the lone wolf cop in most 70's action pictures. I half expected her superiors to demand that she turn in her badge several times. The fact that they didn't, the fact that a relatively junior analyst was sent to spearhead this investigation is one of those interesting facts that you'd like to find out more about but which the movie never addresses. Still, Maya gets what she wants and it's fun to see that play out.
4.) Speaking of which, if it's true the lead investigator in the actual hunt was a woman, that's kind of awesome. There are actually a couple of really great female roles in this (passes the Bechdel Test even).
So yeah. I think it's a movie worth seeing, but not for the film itself but for talking about it later.
Tom
