• Teague
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Topic: Zero Dark Thirty

Just posted a semi-review over on Facebook. As it's not a proper review-review, and I'm not even fully sure how I feel about it yet, I'll put this here and look forward to the conversation.

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No spoilers.

I'm actually oddly conflicted. I can see why everyone is impressed with this movie, it does a lot of things right and very few things wrong, and boy would this be an easy movie to get wrong. I did feel the propaganda a couple of times, but not as much as in virtually any other movie involving the military... and honestly, if any military-related movie was gonna have rah-rah U!S!A! propaganda, it'd be this one. Not so much. So we'll call that a wash.

My inclination is to call it a very good movie that I didn't enjoy too much. The approach they've taken here is to find some person who was there for a long time, but most importantly there at the end, and tell -their- story, giving us a framework to follow for years before the climax happens. I think this was the right call. Unless you wanna tell parallel stories about every person or department involved in eventually tracking down UBL, finding one person who can do a lot of that for you is economical storytelling.

However, that exact good call is what gives me pause about the movie as a whole. The most obvious red flag is the much-discussed "this movie implies torture got us the right information, which is a dubious claim" issue. The lady this film focuses on saw torture happen repeatedly, and saw it garner information, and eventually used information to find UBL, and eventually helped them get him. Clearly this lady is not the whole story, and what she saw seems like a string of causal developments, but right off the bat the "focusing on one person" framework is a bit wobbly because her (surely true-to-her) version of the events is limited. Ad hoc ergo propter hoc. In its defense, the film opens with an unusual title card; not "this film is based on a true story," but "this film is based on first-hand accounts of true events."

Alrighty. Setting aside reality for a while, which I can't speak to anyway, did I enjoy the film itself?

Well, that's the less-obvious red flag with the one-person's-story framework. Since we're following one character's journey the whole time, my... desire... would be to have enjoyed that character more. The lady in the film isn't unsympathetic or anything, but the emotional spectrum (I'll forgive the lack of an emotional arc, because, you know, real life) felt awfully muted to me. This lady sees some very serious, very personal shit a couple times in the film, and I never really felt them affecting her the way they probably would have. (And probably did.) I'm fairly sure her peak emotional watermark in this film is "VERY annoyed," where it seems like she should have been totally devastated at least once. (Where and why is a spoiler.) Her feeling of duty, her obsession, her stoicism, these things all ring true, but we don't see much more from her. There's not a lot of humanity there. Without sacrificing any amount of reality, the film could have done more to make me root for her. As it stands, I feel like I was mostly rooting for her out of politeness and reverence to the subject matter.

There's much, much more to say about the film, but I want to digest it for a while and figure out how I feel. The bottom line is, with the above paragraph, we've outlined the nature of my first experience with the movie: not particularly engaged. Which is unusual, because as we all know, this is a story that defines the last ten years of a complex national narrative. We all care. I've even read one of the books by a SEAL Team 6 member, because I was so interested. Alas, I (and apparently just me, on this one) found the film to be a technically impressive, oddly bloodless, piece of Oscar-bait.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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  • bullet3
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Re: Zero Dark Thirty

I loved it. I get what you're saying, but I was personally totally with the protagonist the whole way through, I really respect committed, driven individuals, and don't agree at all that it's bloodless. They get a lot of mileage out of her being a hard-ass, and she actually gets some very good lines throughout, I really don't think she's that muted. I also think it's a success, not a failure, of the movie that you don't have characters "talking" about the implications/effects of torture on themselves. There is a really shitty version of this movie that could've been made (probably by Oliver Stone and Aaron Sorkin) where the characters would monologue at each-other constantly about the implications of this and that, and whether what they're doing is right.

Bigelow and Boal make the absolutely correct and ballsy call to play everything realistic and straight, because guess what, if you're a professional doing a job, you focus on the job, you don't have these Hollywood-style meaningful conversations about the morality of your job and your motivations as a human being.

Frankly, I think the movie does a remarkable job of navigating a political and moral minefield and coming out unscathed, they depict everything straight on, don't shy away from the costs of the job, and avoid making any judgements.

I actually think the people saying the movie supports torture are clearly not paying attention to this movie, because none of the information yielded from the enhanced interrogations in the film actually proves to be useful. It's actually the exact opposite, there's a specific sequence showing the interrogations leading to useless information, followed by a scene where Maya uses a clever, non-violent bluff to get information from a detainee.
I don't know how anyone can walk away from the film thinking torture is justified or effective.

This movie in many ways feels like The Hurt Locker, except with all the stupid and unrealistic scenes replaced with realistic and tense equivalents. As an action director Bigelow is on fire here, and I haven't felt this tense or off-balance during any film this year. What's crazy is I think this movie that is based mostly on true events works shockingly well as a traditional 3-act narrative, and it's kind of a miracle that it even exists.

I strongly suspect this will go down as the definitive film work about American foreign policy over the last decade, an Apocalypse Now for my generation.

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  • Teague
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Re: Zero Dark Thirty

*nod*

I'll mull that over. You may be right, I'm just working off of my first impression, so it's nothing etched in stone yet.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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  • oTom
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Re: Zero Dark Thirty

I liked it. Jessica Chastain's character makes the film worth watching. It's like Kathryn Bigelow took characters from Sunshine and mixed them into a Discovery Channel documentary. I say this as a positive.

I agree with everything Bullet said only I'm less in love with it.

I strongly suspect this will go down as the definitive film work about American foreign policy over the last decade, an Apocalypse Now for my generation.

Ehhh. I doubt anyone cares about this movie in 30 years. I posted this article on my Facebook  - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011 … t_schmidle - and if you've read it (plus a couple others on the topic) you get ZDT's script. Like, almost to the beat. There were no surprises in this film aside from a handful of character moments. In the four or five conversations I've had about the movie today I keep coming back to one thing: a really well done Discovery Channel documentary. But the virtues of that are limiting.

I don't know how non-political junkies feel about All the President's Men, but ZDT occupies the same space in my brain. I'd never watch ATPM for anything other than an interest in the material. Whereas I watch Apocalypse Now for the artistry of the damn thing. There is a lot of craft in ZDT but not a lot of art, ya know? Since that's my premise for judging the longevity of ZDT, I think its appeal dies with the interest in the OBL manhunt. Which I think is pretty quick. 20 years maybe? Certainly not as long as the downfall of an American president. And of course I'm pulling all of this out of my ass. I have no idea. But there's my guess.

The more I type the less I agree with what I'm saying. But I'm leaving it here for posterity and my biographical historians. 

Bottom line: the movie is a good blow-by-blow account of how they nixed OBL. Not much more. If you think that makes for a Great Movie, there you go. For me it was just a good movie. And I don't know why I say that like it's a bad thing. Not like I'm knee deep in good movies over here. Everyone go see it.

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  • Trey
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Re: Zero Dark Thirty

Yeah, add me to the list of folks who thought it was a well-made procedural drama, with a schmeer of extra relevance since it's based on the true story of the hunt for the Hitler of our era.    A Very Special Episode of Law and Order: Bin Laden, basically.

The most interesting part for me was the actual assault, not because I was engrossed in the story itself but because it was like a really well-shot Seal Team training video.  I liked that the assault didn't feel "Hollywood"ed up to make it artificially exciting - the pace was slow and deliberate, there were minor mistakes and moments of confusion but the team dealt with them and kept going, etc. 

So - not on my list of Greatest Movies of All Time, but not bad in any way either.  Certainly worth seeing.

Trey's Website

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  • bullet3
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Re: Zero Dark Thirty

I think you're right that Apocalypse Now is a bad comparison point actually, that was a bad choice on my part and All the President's Men or Zodiac is probably more fitting. That being said, I don't think ZDT could ever reach that level without sacrificing the authenticity it's going for. Apocalypse Now isn't weighed down by being about a real historical event, so it's able to transcend the setting and be a much more resonant statement about war and humanity in general. Apocalypse Now is also one of the best films ever made (THE best in my personal opinion), so that's a pretty big goal to set on my part.

I think what I was getting at was that if you wanted to show future generations what America went through in the 2000s, this would be the go-to film. It doesn't transcend the events it's documenting, but I don't think it really could and I don't think it's really fair to hold that against it. I think the thing that does give it longevity is it's success as an investigative thriller. Even if you had no personal context or attachment to 9/11 and this time period, I think the movie would work, the opening 30 seconds immediately puts you into that mind-set, and it is an extremely well constructed 3-act structure thriller from there on out.

But ya, we won't really be able to speak to its longevity until we're 20 years out.

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