Zero Dark Thirty

[Borracho]

I watched this last night and, while undeniably well-made, Glenn Greenwald wasn't kidding about how morally shit it is. The script and storyboard might as well have been personally dictated by the CIA.

The torture quotient has grabbed all the headlines (the first 45 minutes are effectively one big, long torture scene) but, in broader terms too, it is amazingly one-eyed and hard right wing. All the fatal violence in the film is carried out by Muslims, except for the raid on Bin Laden's house at the very end. The only Muslim character who happens not to be a shifty scumbag or a religious psycho is a white American military official who is seen praying to Mecca in his office.

Another problem with it is that the heroine is a laughably transparent rip-off of the main character in Homeland, right down to the mental instability and the flaming hair.

Like I said, in purely technical terms it's a suspenseful viewing experience (though one scene in the open air at an airbase, midway through, is surprisingly amateurishly telegraphed in that you know for a good five minutes what's coming at the end of it), but it's still just The Green Berets for the modern age.

[Incandenza]

Zero Dark Thirty

Surprise this morning as Kathryn Bigelow was not nominated for Best Director.

[Reed John]

Zero Dark Thirty

And yet, the CIA has disowned it, apparently.

I refuse to see it on principal and am disappointed it got as many nominations as it did and that Batman III didn't get any.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Zero Dark Thirty

The academy always avoids controversy. In the wake of recent school shootings overt/excessive violence was never going to be well received this year, which explains why both this film, and Tarantino's didn't draw much action. Similarly the sexual content of The Sessions was too much for them. And maybe, if you're feeling paranoid/conspiratorial, Hollywood's Scientology faction applied negative pressure on The Master.

[Cal Alamein]

Zero Dark Thirty

Were I twenty five yrs younger I'd likely want to see it - at this time there is ZERO chance of me seeing it. Still never saw Hurt Locker and really have no desire to see it (I've received very mixed reviews on the film).

[garcia]

Zero Dark Thirty

i remember two things about hurt locker. one was the immense boredom that slowly descended as the movie stretched into what seemed like its seventh hour. the other was a good scene in a safeway or something, where the returning veteran is staring at shelves of brightly coloured breakfast cereal.

zero dark thirty is not much better. i didn't much like it. not so much because of its moral stance, i wouldn't have expected anything else from a big hollywood movie on this theme. in fact, even showing the CIA doing all that torturing was more than i expected. i just didn't really think it worked as a movie. it felt more like a history channel reconstruction documentary.

i think the telegraphed scene AB2 mentions was meant to be telegraphed, it was one of those where the emotional effect comes from the dread rather than the surprise. it's quite a famous incident, maybe they expected people to be familiar with it.

what was her expression at the end meant to signify?

[Felicity, I guess so]

Zero Dark Thirty

The Green Berets for the modern age.

No, that was The Hurt Locker, right down to cutesy 'kid towelhead/Viet you're allowed to like' copycat. This sounds like a whole heap of state dept. approved shit further.

How disappointing that 'the first woman Oscar-winning director' should be such a toady. An argument against tokenism if ever there was one.

[tracteurgarcon]

Zero Dark Thirty

If the level of realism in "The Hurt Locker" is anything to go by I expect this film to feature Bin Laden being taken out by actual seals.

[Borracho]

Zero Dark Thirty

By the way, if anyone downloads this, make sure that the .avi/.mkv./mp4/whatever file is of a half-decent resolution, otherwise the final 20 minutes of the film (which take place almost entirely the darkness) will be nearly unwatchable.

[Come along, Min]

Zero Dark Thirty

Just watched this (2.34GB avi). I was no fan of Hurt Locker either, that was a half-good movie that lost it's credibility about half way through turning it into a kind 4/10. ZDT is no award winner, a solid 6.

Sort of surprised at some of the criticism it's received out there, particularly from those implying it might be some sort of right wing Murica-F**k-yeah film. The much discussed torture scenes are not shown as in a light which excuses them. Indeed, those torture scenes are uncomfortable to watch.

AB2 wrote: Another problem with it is that the heroine is a laughably transparent rip-off of the main character in Homeland, right down to the mental instability and the flaming hair.

Well, she's a woman who works at the CIA like Carrie Mathison, but I don't think Bigelow even began (or even if she's capable of) fleshing out Maya's character enough to make that comparison a laughably transparent rip-off. I'm not sure Bigelow really knows how to develop characters that feel third dimensional. Homeland jumps the shark almost every other episode yet is still more enjoyable than ZDT because all the main characters in it are more sympathetic to greater degree, fleshier.

Reed John wrote: I refuse to see it on principal

What principle would that be?

garcia wrote: it felt more like a history channel reconstruction documentary.

Yes, this. But a decent reconstruction at that. It felt like a rather sober, neutral look at an extraordinary story. I'm sure with the passing years and the filling-in of extra, newer details of the operation, the same story could be told again, coming from a different angle.

what was her expression at the end meant to signify?

She had a lonely teardrop running down her cheek. I was feeling relief that a decade of work had come to a relative happy ending, new beginnings et al.

[imp]

Zero Dark Thirty

Nah, it was for the Osama she never got to know. The man behind the mass murderer.

(Actually, I haven't seen it yet.)

[Borracho]

Zero Dark Thirty

Luke R wrote: She had a lonely teardrop running down her cheek. I was feeling relief that a decade of work had come to a relative happy ending, new beginnings et al.

I actually turned it off as soon as they shot Bin Laden. Like a lot of recently-released movies, it's far too long.

[Incandenza]

Zero Dark Thirty

Yeah, why keep watching after the money shot?

[Come along, Min]

Zero Dark Thirty

imp wrote: Nah, it was for the Osama she never got to know. The man behind the mass murderer.

(Actually, I haven't seen it yet.)

Bigelow directs one scene like you might expect him to jump out the body bag when our lass goes to identify him.

[imp]

Zero Dark Thirty

Saw this last night, mainly because frau imp wanted to, and I'm jumping on the 'unenthused' bandwagon. I just didn't really see the point of it, except to tell the story of how OBL was killed, the fundamentals of which we all know by heart anyway. They didn't shade the characters (maybe not a bad thing, as this would just have meant more fictionalising and distortion of reality), and they were dishonest with the torture scenes - I think torture is probably a lot more distressing than portrayed here, even though the violence was quite extreme, but if they'd gone any further, it would have been too distressing and unwatchable for cinema audiences, and it was already in the dodgy area of voyeuristic masochism from a viewer's point of view. So it's a tricky area for directors - you can't deny it happened, it's tough to portray honestly, and it's very hard to watch. I'd rather watch a moral and philosophical approach to torture like Death and the Maiden than just plain torture. No one's ever shown talking about it in ZDT, they just do it, and Maya flinches a bit to start with to show she has some humanity, but she's soon all in.

I was uncomfortable that the agent, Dan, who was shown torturing prisoners was otherwise shown as this affable, darkly funny and quite sympathetic character apparently suffering no torment of conscience at all. The one- to two-dimensionality of Maya was possibly deliberate - no one knows anything about her, not even her colleagues, and perhaps the intention was to show the personal sacrifices that people make doing this kind of job. Maybe they are not really complete people in the conventional sense, and stem themselves from getting emotionally involved with other human beings in order to reach their professional goals.

The tears at the end were maybe for lost colleagues, or relief that the operation came off. Or maybe a realisation that she does a shitty job in a shitty world, that she directly took part in torture, and that the end result is more death, and oh yes, I don't have a personal life either.

Or maybe, like me, she was just happy that it was all over at last.

[RobW]

Zero Dark Thirty

Well I thought it was very good, and much more thrilling and gripping than Argo, for example.

[San Bernardhinault]

Zero Dark Thirty

I finally got around to seeing this yesterday. I think, mostly, I agree with the assessment that it was a very well made reconstruction documentary. Perfectly fine to watch with some well constructed scenes. A little unsavoury in its pro-torture stance, but not as bad as I'd been led to believe. But surely not an Oscar winner of any sort.

[anton pulisov]

Zero Dark Thirty

So I was stuck in Norway and Zero Dark Thirty started on the Norwegian public broadcaster, which doesn't dub and has no ads. Great.

I turned it off after 45 minutes. There's not really any plot and it has the feel of B movie. Not to mention the one dimensional comic book Arab characters and the machofication of toruture.

Maybe Price Waterhouse Cooper fucked up the 2013 Oscar nomination process, I don't know.