Zero Dark Thirty

The chick who directed and created Hurt Locker is doing this film so I dun see what can go wrong. Shit is gonna be stellar.

edited 17th Nov '12 5:11:42 PM by Couchpotato20

Well, actual military personnels and veterans were quite displeased due to sheer amount of inaccurate portrayals of military in The Hurt Locker.

Good Fellas was a terrible movie because it inaccurately portrayed gangsters.

edited 19th Nov '12 1:39:40 PM by Scardoll

There were some really simple cockups in Hurt Locker that wouldn't have taken a lot of effort to fix. Namely that EOD doesn't go anywhere alone with just 3 dudes in a Humvee. Ever. EVER. Also, good luck sneaking out of a base in Baghdad. Good. Fucking. Luck.

Anyway, spoiler alert: Osama dies at the end.

A rather postive review with praise for the cast including Jessica Chastain who is the main focus.

Sounds good so far.

Personally, I would love to see a film adaptation of Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book The Looming Tower. I think a proper, tasteful look at it could be a very good film, along the lines of Downfall.

Still, I will look at ZDT. Though given Hollywood's general illiteracy on matters military, I am not optimistic.

I have a feeling the military personnels who were actually involved would be less than pleased.

I really doubt the actual mission and the lead up were that exciting.

Was that a response to me or the film? Care to elaborate

Oh, I was just talking about the film.

Cool. Why are the military upset? Are they portrayed badly, or is it the usual Hollywood silliness.

In Rotten Tomatoes, it has 100% score, out of 30 reviews.

Impressive.

We military types are always skeptical about Hollywood portrayal of the military, and frequently are the most critical of the slightest screwups.

Meh. I just don't see any way to make this exciting without fabricating a bunch of shit. Either they tell sort of the truth and make it more of a drama involving a bunch of intel exchanged back and forth(Which will all be as wildly far from how things actually happened, because of the fact that those resources are still classified, and still in use) or they'll find a way to shoehorn more stuff in there.

So essentially here's how I look at it.. What really happened in the process of getting to that mission is classified, and obviously the Do D isn't going to tell the folks making the film. So focusing on that sort of factual legitimacy isn't a possibility. And on the other end of that, the only way to still make it entertaining is to make a bunch of shit up, which means I won't like the movie, because making movies about real operations and then shoehorning stuff in that didn't really happen pisses me off.

As close to the real thing as possible would bore me, because it'd just be a bunch of scenes about intelligence analysts taking a look at different bits of intel and then finally intercepting that call from Osama's aide to confirm his location. Then we know how the rest goes.

Osama dies.

So the only negative reviews for this is for it being "amoral" and is written by "Spirituality and Practice" and... "Christian Science Monitor"? "Welp" would be redundant.

Uggh... Too Soon! This will not end well. Anywhere.

edited 9th Jan '13 1:21:20 AM by Ficus

Good for them. The movie supports the lie that torture is an either effective or acceptable means of obtaining information. It is immoral, and false, and it's nice that someone is pointing that out.

Is it just me or the film is a proper Oscar Bait?

It is Oscar Bait.

edited 10th Jan '13 1:49:20 PM by Achaemenid

Saw the movie yesterday. Shit...was.. GODLY. It's like the political realest bag of epic and has the adrenaline pumped electrifying win that I got from Avengers.

I hope I'm wrong, but it looks a little too jingoistic, like " 'Murica, fuck yeah, Oorah! "

I watched the film back in December (a theatre with it in limited-release was nearby), and I thought it was one of the most powerful films I've seen. It's definitely not of the kind of hyperpatriotic emotion-fanning that you might expect from, say, Act of Valor. The US role is not glamorized at all; in fact, for Americans, the first portion of film is as viscerally disturbing as it gets (see: torture, controversy regarding), and even the later portions refrain from glamorizing intelligence work or the bureaucracy behind the spies. Even the climactic SEAL raid on the Bin Laden compound is shown as methodical, brutal, and ruthless, against only token resistance from the inhabitants; it's suspenseful, it's tense, it's almost boring in its pace. What it's not portrayed as is a blazing heroic firefight that you'd expect. There's a powerful sense of cathartic release when it's all done, but it's not a sense of victory. The end line of the film leaves the audience with a question: Chastain's character, Maya, is alone on a USAF transport; the crew chief asks her, "Where do you want to go?"

Right now the big question is over the film's depiction of torture; everybody seems to have formed their own opinion. Jeff Stacey (spoiler warning in the linked site!) over at the polisci blog Duck of Minerva pretty much sums up my takeaway from the film: first, it's depicted unflinchingly as something horrific and disturbing as hell; there's no question that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" counted as torture. Second, it did give some information—but the CIA was absolutely awash in information at the time, and not all of the information it had was reliable. Plot discussion in spoiler tags follow.

It's true that the first detainee gave the information about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—but he gave nothing away when he was tortured; rather, Maya convinced him to part with it by sharing a meal with him, while tricking him into it. It's classic tradecraft, and it succeeds where torture fails. Further, information gained during torture led the CIA on a wild-goose chase that ultimately led to the Camp Chapman attack; detainees routinely held out against the worst kinds of torture, or got around it by spilling misinformation. Instead, the real leads to Abu Ahmed were obtained through old-fashioned spy work: digging through liaison files, figuring out when and why detainees were lying, and the occasional judicious use of bribery.

It's all pretty subtle and demands that you think carefully about where all the information is coming from (think Tinker Tailor instead of Jason Bourne). And it's not a case where Bigelow simply comes out and says "torture is wrong and didn't work"; it's cheap and easy to make a show trial under totally-controlled conditions against the case for torture, but the film wasn't like that. Instead, the director took the much harder, much longer way of laying out the events and letting the audience draw its conclusions. Judging by the Rorschach-blot range of reactions, she succeeded. I personally loved the film, but it'll be a long while before I see it again. It's emotionally draining as all hell.

edited 22nd Jan '13 12:44:03 PM by SabresEdge

I read an interview with Mark Strong in which he pointed out that the movie does show torture as ineffective, and bin Laden's location is acquired purely through intelligence gathered by other means (as apparently in real life). The film's not out yet, but I'm going to withhold judgement until I actually see it.

Torture isn't effective? Hmm. Must go and tell the ghosts of British and Allied spies who were captured when members of their networks were picked up and tortured by the Gestapo and Wehrmacht intelligence agencies during world war two and ended up being shot, tortured themselves or turned against their comrades that torture doesn't work.

It just doesn't work all the time for everyone it is used on or used by. Bland statements like:

"The movie supports the lie that torture is an either effective or acceptable means of obtaining information"

just aren't nuanced enough, in my view.

Welp, we can add Jeremy Scahill. I was flipping channels and came across a scathing interview from him. Though he's opposed to the drone war entirely.