Zero Dark Thirty – Good Cinema, Bad Politics

First of all, I have to say that I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow as a director since I watched Strange Days in college. So I might be biased in the below comments.

I want to comment on the movie in two different perspectives:

1. Just ignore this story being on the quest of the USA for catching Osama bin Laden, but rather some country X is searching for some evil guy Y.
2. Focus on the story of USA trying to catch Osama bin Laden.

(1)

This is a great example of high-quality cinema and tells the story at hand very successfully.

I usually don’t like to see people in uniforms, neither in real life nor in movies. I find most of the movies involving modern day soldiers, battles, and CIA agents very boring. I would even ban the money dedicated to them if I had the power. However, in this 2.5 hour film, which is full of CIA and well-uniformed people, I didn’t even realize how the time passed. The story flows very densely from the start; it keeps you tense and awake. This tenseness goes to an extreme level toward the end of the film when the dedicated team is looking for the enemy Y in his possible fortress, even though you know very well how this search would end. The details are well-placed in many scenes, especially the just mentioned search scene. Also, the protagonist’s face is priceless throughout the film; ever-tired and determined convincing us that she is definitely a one-woman-army and she adds herself to the smart, strong, cool, and skilled Kathryn Bigelow female characters list.

(2)

Some parts of the story might seem pointless to you, especially if you are not from the USA and do not have a big national pride.

The long journey to hunt down a single man, all the resources spent on it, and all the people died on the way might look really meaningless knowing that it is not going to solve actual problem of terrorism at all. Nobody in the film aims to look at what lies underneath it all. It’s just a quest looking for a single man, an important man but a very tiny and unimportant piece in the whole picture. Therefore, in the scene where the search team is being shouted at on the fact that they are failing miserably on the quest, you just want to tell them to go get real jobs. When the protagonist says she wants to find and kill Osama bin Laden, you again think “well isn’t it better to keep him alive to get information in order to tear down the whole terrorist organization if he’s the absolute important leader?”. However, this is not a problem related to the film, it’s related to the story and the story itself comes from real life USA pride and glory gibberish. So the film shows us that gibberish wrapped-up in very good cinema that can be used as a lecture on many aspects for directing, if you manage to ignore reality.

Finally, just my take on the torture scenes: I found the discussion around this highly overrated after seeing the film. Torture is used in many parts of the world, when especially political prisoners are involved. The film shows what happens in reality by taking no sides in it. It’s true that the tortured people in the film eventually give some useful information. However, under any circumstances no matter what the outcome is, I personally, do not find it OK when seeing a guy being chained to the ceiling from his arms or kept in a tiny box for hours or almost choked to death. It just disgusts me. The confessions do not even seem all reliable seeing the state of the tortured ones in the end. So I do not think the film praises torture, it just leaves you with your own perception of torture thinking about the possible outcomes. There might always be other ways to get those outcomes.

One of the best scenes of the film is when you see some of the main characters looking with their WTF-faces at Obama on TV saying that they do not use torture because it is wrong. The film just states that torture does happen as a part of this process whether you like it or not or whether it is good or bad. Even how the protagonist evolves on the matter of torture shows that. In the initial torture scenes, she looks very uneasy while later on in the film she’s the one giving orders to punch one of the detainee accepting this as a part of her job in her clan and not questioning it further. It is just the ugly facts.