Zero Dark Thirty Review

What is this movie about, and why in the hell should I care?

Zero Dark Thirty is a gun-ho ‘kill the baddies’ Hollywood action flick / avante garde BDSM art film, directed by Katheryn Bigalow (director: Point Break, 1995 ; The Hurt Locker, 2008), about the 11-year long manhunt for Osama bin Laden–quite possibly the shittiest James Bond villain we never had–making for some unpredictable nail-biting high-wire tension as two state-or-the art stealth helos packed with a couple dozen of the world’s most highly trained and heavily armed professional assassins land outside an unguarded suburban house in a third world suburb in the dead of night, break in using breaching charges and sledgehammers, equipped with the latest nightvision and communications gear and (SPOILER ALERT!) double tap the crippled shut-in hiding upstairs, clutching in the dark, unarmed and pissing his pajamas like a coward before receiving two quick shots, bam-bam!, right to the dialysis machine–say goodnight grandpa, as Dan the black site interrogator would say: ‘Your jihad is over, bro.’ Wow! Talk about a battle of David vs. Goliath!–and why should you care? Easy; you should care because its your patriotic duty! After all, what are you some sort of stinking terrorist? Don’t you know what happens to terrorists? No? Then watch this pulse-pounding pseudo-journalistic revenge-fantasy caper and watch closely, it may prove helpful when we locate you and send our ninjas into your home to murder your family in their sleep, you know, 11 years down the road when nobody cares anymore.

What were your expectations before seeing the film, and how did the film compare to those expectations?

Like many a film fan not hiding under a wet rock, I should admit that the controversy surrounding this film dominated my entire pre-conception of it. The makers of, and more peripherally the marketing campaign for, Zero Dark Thirty have consciously invited this controversy by A.) repeatedly insisting, to an obnoxious degree, on the film’s historic, factual, and (I shudder to say) forensic authenticity, only to B.) play fast and loose with (i.e. outright lie about) what was certain to be the most controversial issue surrounding events depicted in the film and ultimately, by association, the film itself: and that is the issue of torture. More specifically, the issue of the EFFICACY of torture. At no point did I expect the film to pose the moral question, the obvious one; namely, “Is a foreign policy based on forced disappearances, systematic torture and extra-legal summary executions, like, wrong?” Do these practices not directly contradict the values of democracy, dignity and the rule of law which the West purports to uphold and defend?

Unsurprisingly, at no point in the picture’s 150+ minute runtime does that question come up. What did surprise me is that, forget the moral issues of torture for a moment, the filmmakers willingly dropped the ball on a golden opportunity to make a lucid statement on the notorious inefficacy of the post-9/11 bag’em-n-drag’em style of handling captives, subjecting them to what Defense Secretary and Nick Nolte impersonator Donald Rumsfeld so infamously described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’–techniques that, in well over a decade since the Global War on Terror was declared, have yet to yield even one piece of valid operational intelligence.

Instead, the movie wastes no time lazily (at best, cynically) skirting the issue altogether by simply changing inconvenient facts and events and thereby obliterating their own inflated veneer of credibility. And for what? It’s important for movies to have a point of view. Even if that point of view is wrong. Unfortunately for everyone, you can’t have your point of view and eat it too. If you are marketing a movie on the merit of its factual authenticity (which, by the way, is a stupid idea in the first place), you have to follow through. A few minor details here and there can and will be butchered, embellished or even overlooked (which happens plenty in this film as well, for example: when the SEALs are preparing to blow open a door the point man stupidly shouts BREACHER! which never happens, especially since the operative had already communicated his command with a non-verbal sequence of helmet-taps), but this was different. These weren’t just details being butchered or omitted.

Feel free to manipulate your audience with charisma, style and appeals to emotion, we may catch on during the drive home and feel used and cheated, but by then its too late to get our 12.50 back and, shit, even if we got taken for a ride it maybe was fun while it lasted. You’re filmmakers, its your job to manipulate us and you have so many tried and true tricks up your sleeves to do it. Go on, council, put a partial witness on the stand and move us with her biased, carefully rehearsed testimony–cue the crocodile tears if you have to, show us some cleavage; go on, appeal to flattery, whatever you gotta do to make us disregard the overwhelming evidence against your case and vote with our stupid, mislead hearts. But here’s what you don’t do: you don’t tamper with the evidence just because you aren’t clever enough to persuade the jury; just because you are too coldhearted to win them over with charm. Changing the events of a ‘true story’ based supposedly on ‘first hand accounts’ so that it elevates drama is one thing (i.e., Argo, The Social Network) but doing it to suit your shitty ideology is flat out lazy and far worse than manipulating our emotions (which, devious as it may be, is what we’re ultimately paying for) it insults our intellect–it shows genuine contempt for the audience. I expected to be taken on a very particular ride. One propelled by the engine of dramatic momentum and carried forth by the greased wheels of carefully devised empathy; i expected to be cleverly pitted against my own humanist prejudices in an ominous but challenging joust of heart vs. head–then, in due time, probably realize I’d been had, you know, on the ride home.

Heart versus Head, like Thunderdome: TWO ENTER, ONE LEAVE. Problem was, the filmmakers couldn’t make their case by appealing to either–unless of course they just decided to change major events and hope nobody notices, so they did just that and in the end I was certain I’d been taken for an idiot. Besides that I expected a tense, clinical and unflinching procedural caper—a well-paced and highly-focused game of cat and mouse, and in that sense I was quite pleased. I was expecting a potentially disagreeable film that was, nonetheless, undeniably effective for what it was. And, for what it is worth, at no point in this movie did I feel bored so that ought to count for something.

In thematic, narrative, or even technological terms, was this movie unique or original?

Not particularly; after all, ZDT ultimately plays out like a game of cat and mouse—albeit one where the mouse is (practically) never seen. You could say its an investigative procedural, a crime-and-punishment caper, and perhaps even a character study—albeit one that is terribly incomplete. What makes the film original is plainly that its story revolves around the capture (rather: murder) of Osama bin Laden, and not someone else—but even then it isn’t like we haven’t already seen the SEAL raid on the Abbottabad compound dramatized numerous times on television and elsewhere.

What made this different was a Hollywood budget (not much, really; about 45 mil) and a creative aesthetic sensibility that allowed a philosophically shallow script to dip its toe in artistic waters while claiming to have taken full dive. ZDT‘s opening scene is reminiscent to that of Fahrenheit 9/11: the screen is black and we hear harrowing audio recordings of 9-11 callers trapped in the World Trade Center on the morning of the attack. This gives us the emotional punch in the gut we need to forgo the hideousness of the ensuing fifteen minute torture scene that follows at a CIA black site.

Numerous terror attacks occur throughout the film and our composite characters are conveniently in the center of every one of these episodes. When a key member of the team is killed by a Jordanian mole turned double-agent, shit gets personal and now we are dealing with a pure revenge story. As Maya so delicately puts it: “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m gonna kill bin Laden.” And, “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.” Speaking of episodes, the film is broken up into six of them. Six chapters: 1.) The Saudi Group; 2.) Abu Ahmed; 3.) The Meeting; 4.) Human Error; 5.) Tradecraft; and 6.) The Canaries. This episodic structure doesn’t hinder the film’s tension, thankfully; and helps punctuate a film that could otherwise be read as a run-on sentence. But, again, was this original film-making?

If this film had not been based on ‘true’ events, if it hadn’t been based on Osama bin Laden, how different would it have been from a movie like Black Hawk Down, or other spy/war movies, or police procedurals, or other action thrillers based on fugitives or terrorists? The movie’s tagline is, “The greatest manhunt in history.” I guess they haven’t heard of Carlos the Jackal—the notorious Venezuelan terrorist whose global manhunt was even lengthier and more intensive than bin Laden’s and whose film, Carlos (2010), directed by Olivier Assayas was unarguably superior. The same can be said of the French thrillers Mesrine: Killer Instinct and its sequel Public Enemy #1 (2008), directed by Jean-Francois Richet.

Was the film visually engaging?

Generally, yes. But there’s nothing particularly challenging or inventive to it. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good—about as good as a movie can look when most of the first act takes place inside a dungeon. The color palette is drab while light sources are often soft and dim; master shots are stark and grainy while closeups are composed with such uncanny sharpness you can almost see into the actors’ pores. When we arrive at the compound in Abbottabad, it almost feels like a lunar landing; otherworldly; utterly alien. A handful of tastefully brief POV shots glow a haunting nightvision green, hurling you head-first into a surreal and deliberately ugly labyrinthine nightmare of urban war. In a purely visual sense, they completely nailed that scene. Even though you already now how it’ll turn out, the raid is brimming moment-to-moment with riveting white-knuckle tension. Recurrent explosions of violence are typically over almost before they begin; deaths happen quickly, partially obscured and un-romanticized. I also couldn’t help but notice a nice easter-egg / title-drop during the lead-up to the raid, while Maya is waiting inside a tent at the airfield in Jalalabad while commandos approach the compound in Abbottabad, you can see the digital clock reads 00:30. I thought that was cute.



ZDT was shot digitally on the ARRI Alexa and there are portions of the film that are shot handheld, imbuing those moments with an earthy and untethered documentary vibe which, pleasing though it may be visually, is troubling in the broader sense that it insists on its own journalistic authenticity and, frankly, its own importance to the historical record.

That said, I think the makers of this picture knew what they were doing. Ultimately they held back on the documentary aesthetic to preserve a semblance of control and authority when they could have gone balls out with the shakey-cam and disoriented the audience as so many modern action flicks commonly do—and ultimately, it is the stillness, poise and icy resolve of Greig Fraser’s highly disciplined cinematography that defines the clinical yet unwashed visual tone of the movie. Much like the story depicted through the lens of Zero Dark Thirty, the palette is limited and bleak, the focus is shallow, and the framing is simple; much like its characters, the visuals are dirty but firmly in control.

How would you describe the tone of the movie?

Brooding, dark, clinical, exacting, cynical and—at times—ironic and emotionally detached; threaded tightly with intrigue and consistently suspenseful; uncompromisingly amoral. I’m tempted to draw comparisons to the hit TV show “24,” but that may be overstating things a bit.

There aren’t any bullshit love stories shoehorned into the narrative, either—and for that I am grateful. I’m also pleased that ZDT generally spares its audience any overt, flag-waving jingoism—though one could easily argue that that stuff is just buried in the subtext (and not deeply, either).

On its surface, the movie tries to be apolitical and unequivocal. In the face of mounting critical controversy, the creative voices behind the picture have insisted that “everyone has their own opinion” of the facts (Bigelow) and others (namely, screenwriter Mark Boal) cited the “complexity” of the actual true story as the determining factor in why the film’s narrative simplifies events and uses so many composite characters. Its too bad that none of that pesky “complexity” made its way into the film.

By trying so hard to be apolitical, the makers of ZDT may have (intentionally or not) composed a filmic ode to reckless and fanatical violence and the violation of international law. Its a good thing that this movie has stirred up passionate debate on the subject of American aggression and use of torture, but the film itself has nothing of value to contribute to the discussion.

These debates are far from antiquated, this is not ancient history. It is lazy and careless to skirt your responsibility to make a stand on an important subject just because you think your audience is too dumb or too unwilling to comprehend all the “complexity” or because you don’t want to tell that kind of story anyway, you’d prefer—we’d all prefer—a knockout-punch action thriller with ‘splosions and cheap throwaway lines between detainees and their captors like “You’re just a garbage man in the corporation, why should I talk to you?” Lines like that belong in ’80s B-action flicks.

In a moral sense, the tone was highly problematic. No one on the US side even bats an eyelash at the abuses they witness at the hands of CIA interrogators, and even the most egregious human rights violations and illegalities are treated, universally and without a single dissenting voice, as business as usual—though in reality, there was no shortage of professionals working in the CIA, FBI, and the departments of State and Justice who voiced serious concerns and/or publicly resigned in protest. There isn’t a whiff of that reality that made it into this picture.

What were they trying to say?

You can’t kill an omelet without torturing some eggs. Then there’s that old trope of “He Who Chases Monsters” … you know, sort of becomes one.

I’ll break it down as neatly as I can: The intrepid young woman, a fiery redhead, who is married to the job (“I’m not the girl who fucks.”) uses her sharp wits and monomaniacal devotion to go against the stubbly grain of her macho bosses and their brutish methods and, through her unwavering poise, toughness, and diligence overcomes the doubts and prejudices of her male superiors and ultimately leads them to their White Whale.

This is what the actual historical record has to say about how we got UBL: five detainees at Gitmo corroborated the existence of a courier used by bin Laden, suggesting his rough whereabouts in the process. Satellite imaging then revealed a conspicuous building in Abbottabad Pakistan, surrounded by 16-foot walls and devoid of any modern communications technology (no cellphones, landlines, satellites, internet, etc.). Aerial surveillance systems equipped with heat signature technology also revealed that there was a tall man that never left the third floor, that a only a single unidentified person made frequent trips to and from the building, and that residents of the compound were burning their trash as opposed to setting it out—a clear hint that whoever these people were had valuable intel which they didn’t want compromised. Then old-fashioned human intelligence work on the ground further corroborated the likelihood of UBL’s presence.

Some of this is explored in Zero Dark Thirty, but these events are mostly glossed over or, at best, are footnotes to everything else going on. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, none of this crucial evidence was brought to light through the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” or water boarding. The alleged 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, known colloquially as the 20th hijacker, was waterboarded over 150 times and revealed nada—and he is just one example out of tens of thousands. Even Senators John McCain and Dianne Fienstein publicly objected to the movie’s implication that torture led to hard evidence of bin Laden’s whereabouts, demanding an explanation from the CIA along the lines of: “What insider information did you reveal to the makers of this movie that you withheld from the United States Senate?”

For John McCain, whose first hand experience as a victim of torture must have animated his outrage, it was clear that someone—either the filmmakers or the CIA itself—were simply unconcerned with the hard evidence and the historical record. To date, there has not been a single case in the history of US counter-terrorism where the use of torture led to operational intelligence used to thwart an attack—and that isn’t because we didn’t torture enough. What we managed to do, instead, was piss off and humiliate the entire Arab world at the height of our military occupation of Iraq, a time when we needed their trust (or at least their benefit of the doubt) more than ever.

Zero Dark Thirty‘s position on this subject is perplexing to me. They got this guy, Ammar, in the beginning who is supposedly a money man for Richard Reid and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all these bad dudes and the CIA (namely Dan and Maya) are torturing him extensively in an effort to get him to reveal operational details on an upcoming attack in Saudi Arabia. They break him, but instead of giving them the truth he babbles incoherently as they lock his crusty naked carcass into a tiny wooden box and, sure enough, the attack takes place anyway, in the province of Khobar, Saudi Arabia. In the next scene, Maya hatches a nifty gambit to make lemons into lemonade by tricking a battered and badly sleep-deprived Ammar into thinking he actually DID reveal information about the attack and that his testimony under duress, which he may not remember due to his disorientation, actually led the CIA thwarting the attack and arresting his Jihadi compatriots. After all, he’s been locked inside a box for like three days, and he doesn’t know any better. Maya’s plan works like a charm. Duped, thinking he is already compromised and being threatened once again with torture, Ammar begins to reveal information which leads to the moniker of what turns out to be UBL’s personal courier. This next link in the chain is an old man rotting in a Pakistani dungeon whom Maya threatens to give over to the Israelis when the guy suddenly flips and says, flat out, “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question, I will answer it.” That event, which proved such a big break in the case, was also completely fabricated. Yay, torture! Later, the next link in the chain is captured but refuses to talk and, unfortunately for our heroes, it isn’t long before Obama publicly condemns Enhanced Interrogation Techniques in a televised speech, leaving the interrogators and intelligence officers (who happen to be watching the speech on TV) visibly disgruntled, having been left with no recourse but to resort to actual investigative police work which, in time, succeeds in large part to evidence heretofore obtained, as the movie insists, through the use of … (Anyone? Anyone?) torture.

According to the movie’s logic and sequence of events, the CIA wouldn’t have had access to crucial information in their “post-torture” investigations if it weren’t for evidence and testimony obtained through the previous regimes of “enhanced interrogation.” But wait a minute: that information wasn’t even accurate, it was mostly just lies and disinformation; deliberate red herrings. Maya and others later make the case that these lies, in their stubborn ubiquity, tipped them off—sent alarm bells ringing in their heads that something else was going on—because, like, if these guys are going through so much effort to lie then they must be protecting someone super important. But that someone important was eventually discovered and not through torture, just basic detective work. But even the success of Maya’s clever plan to trick Ammar, as sly and cerebral as the film tries to present it, is totally dependent on Ammar having been ruthlessly tortured in the first place.

Okay, so maybe you’re thinking: Well, it worked, didn’t it? Gee, I dunno, did they stop the attack in Khobar? Wasn’t that kind of the point? But the film purports that this is how it all happened and, in that case, the clear conclusion is that, yes, in a weird oblique way torture and the threat of torture did, time and again, net valuable intel that ultimately led to UBL–and it did so by netting the wrong answer every time while somehow nudging us in the general direction of the truth. Confused? You fucking should be. In other words, torture worked even though it didn’t. It worked because the utter bullshit we got out of detainees somehow led us to some other truth. What Don Rumsfeld would call, “An unknown unknown.” Like some twisted process of elimination, all that incoherent psychobabble the CIA had heard from detainees had tipped them off, in retrospect mind you, that something else was going on. I can hardly think of a shakier foundation for an argument supporting the efficacy and efficiency of torture and to make matters worse this whole Ammar scenario is a fabrication to begin with.

So then, what was that ‘something else’ going on? And how did the positive evidence for it even surface? The movie reduces it to Maya’s brilliant deduction that, “You can’t run a global network of interconnected cells from a cave,” and her hunch that a detainee in Pakistan had confused a photo of bin Laden’s courier for the courier’s deceased brother—because, guess what, the CIA and the Pakistani ISI were using the wrong damn photo the whole time. Facepalm!

Maya puts two and two together and realizes that the guy in the photo may be dead, but he the guy they are really after is still out there. Nobody else catches this obvious discrepancy except Maya, and a great deal of her character’s struggle is simply persuading the byzantine bureaucracy of the CIA that she is right and they are wrong. And that’s pretty much the whole plot of the movie. Maya thinks she knows the truth and says so, and in the end she’s right. Cut to black.

Was the screenplay well-written?

It certainly had its moments. The first third of the movie is littered with military jargon and some minor cliches but as the story develops the nuance and believability of character’s dialogue improves noticeably. There are precious moments where characters say what you’d imagine real people to say. At one point, after apprehensively participating the brutal opening interrogation Maya is asked by CIA handler Joseph Bradley (played by Kyle Chandler), what she thinks of Pakistan. To which Maya casually replies, “Its kinda fucked up.”

Such moments of believable candor are peppered lightly throughout the film and they elevate the material into something slightly more human. (certainly not humane, but human). Unfortunately, we don’t learn anything about the characters and their true humanity never quite emerges. It is ironic that so many composite characters end up so utterly one-dimensional.

Then there are some strange moments of levity that just don’t belong. Like when Justin (DEVGRU – Special Operative) jokes about how “if her confidence is the one thing that’s keeping me from getting ass-raped in a Pakistani prison I’m gonna honest with you, bro. I’m cool with it.” This is the only point in the film where Maya actually laughs, and I found it truly disturbing.

There’s a point to that joke: What we’re doing is illegal; we are essentially invading a sovereign “ally” that has a nuclear arsenal, a country whose supposed alliance with the US is so tenuous and volatile that such an incursion could have started another full-scale war—one we couldn’t afford after the decade-long quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan (neither of which are appropriately mentioned in the film) from which we have apparently learned nothing. Maya then saves face with an even more disturbing declaration when she openly admits, “Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to use you guys, with your dip and velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb. But people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb. So they’re using you guys as canaries. And, in theory, if bin Laden isn’t there, you can sneak away and no one will be the wiser. But bin Laden is there. And you’re going to kill him for me.”

Talk about She Who Chases Monsters, at this point Maya is so hardened by her sense of vengeance and duty that she could give a crap if there are innocent women and children down there waiting to get blown to shreds (and yes, there are many of them).

Finally, by the third act of the film, the raid on the compound and particularly the SEAL team tasked with carrying it out are tacked on, like some afterthought. We don’t see the SEALs training for their mission using ramshackle mock-ups of the compound (a scene I would have really liked to see) and we don’t really get a sense of where they belong in this story or what their plight and sacrifice could possibly consist of—other than their (entirely legitimate) concerns of Pakistani ass-rape.

There was another disconcerting moment when Dan, the ruthless interrogator, says he wants out; that he is tired of his job because, shucks, “I guess I’ve seen too many naked dudes.” I wonder how self-aware Mark Boal really is as a writer. Maybe that was his way of showing how a macho man like Dan would rationalize his inability to continue at his job without admitting that he has been emotionally scarred, maybe it was his way of saying ‘I can’t take this madness anymore’ despite his inability or unwillingness to articulate any real vulnerability within himself. Either that or it was a lazy gay joke—I’m honestly not certain, though I’d like to place my faith in the former interpretation.

As it turns out, Mark Boal’s script for what later became Zero Dark Thirty started out years ago as the story of the unsuccessful hunt for bin Laden culminating in the failed NATO assault in the mountains of Tora Bora. I wonder what kind of film this would have been if, midway through pre-production, the news of bin Laden’s death hadn’t come down the pipe.

Were the performances well executed? What about casting? Which performances were best, and which one(s) didn’t cut it?

Jessica Chastain (as Maya) was electric—even if the script failed miserably at giving her a multi-dimensional character to play. Maya is the calm eye of a horrible storm. A cold, robotic and unrelatable character. Nonetheless, Chastain’s sustained intensity gives her an edge—if you can’t be three-dimensional, you better have at least one good edge. I have a tough time picturing any other young Hollywood actress doing any better with the material Chastain was given. (Side note on Maya’s patriotic vow of chastity: Seriously, what is it with the pseudo-feminist Hollywood trope that dictates that women protagonists are incapable of having a career and a sex life simultaneously? This happens all the time in modern American films. Male characters don’t face this dilemma. If feminism is about equality than why can’t we be expected to believe an adult woman can handle both? Okay, moving on …)

There’s Jason Clarke whose piercing bird-of-prey eyes leap off the screen, and though the script has his character “petting the dog” (i.e. feeding the monkeys) one too many times, his icy demeanor makes him a menacing and compulsively watchable presence onscreen.

Mark Strong (as George, the CIA guy) seems to love these kind of roles (see Syriana, Body of Lies, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and its always great to see him on screen though there isn’t much for him to do here.

Same goes for James Gandolfini (as the director of the CIA, a character based on Leon Panetta) who is, unfortunately, totally underutilized.

You have the magnetic Jennifer Ehele (who plays Jessica, a CIA officer and colleague of Maya’s) and I wish there was more to her plot-line in which she is tasked with developing a snitch within bin Laden’s network, which I think is every bit as interesting as the hunt for bin Laden itself. Its unfortunate that the movie marginalizes Jessica’s character and relegates her role to that of a sacrificial lion, essentially making her the ‘Goose’ to Maya’s ‘Maverick.’ Either way, her performance felt the most human out of the rest.

Then you’ve got Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt (Patrick and Justin, respectively) as the DEVGRU spec-ops commandos and they provide the plucky comic relief throughout much of the second half of the movie which feels misplaced and insensitive and weird. At one point, we’re expected to laugh at one of Pratt’s quips moments after he shoots an unarmed woman to death but its okay because, like, he’s that guy from Parks & Rec.

Lastly, a shout-out to Reda Kateb who—method actor that he is—demanded he be actually and mercilessly tortured on set even when cameras weren’t rolling, eat your heart out Daniel Day Lewis. (Okay, I made that last part up, but his performance was terrific and couldn’t have been easy. I hope to see him more often in American movies, hopefully clothed and un-tortured.)

A quick note on casting:

During the last third of the movie there are a bit too many recognizable faces to sustain any feeling of authenticity/suspension of disbelief (minor qualm, they are all good actors) Mark Strong seems typecast but really he just seems to live for these roles. And by the way, WTF is James Gandolfini doing as CIA chief?

What was your favorite scene/line of the movie?

CIA Director: “What’s this – this cluster of buildings down here?”

George: “The PMA – it’s the Pakistani Military Academy.”

CIA Director: [shoots George a suspicious look]

George: “It’s their West Point.”

CIA Director: “And how close is it to the house?”

George: “About a mile.”

Maya: “Four thousand, two hundred, twenty one feet; it’s closer to eight-tenths of a mile.”

CIA Director: “Who are you?”

Maya: “I’m the motherfucker that found this place, sir.”

_ _ _

Cuz like, when I seen dat shit I was like, “Mm-hm, you go guuurl!”

What was your least favorite scene/line of the movie?

Ammar is naked and in chains, wearing a dog collar, badly beaten and malnourished.

Ammar: “Please help me.”

Maya: [after a long beat] “You can help yourself by being truthful.”

This was Maya’s first test to pass, as far as the audience is concerned, and when she proceeds to fuck with Ammar’s battered head I get the feeling you’re supposed to go, “You go girl.” Whereas if it was a male character delivering that line, you may be inclined to think: “What a heartless dick!”

It isn’t necessarily a terrible line. I guess after that exhausting opening 15 minutes of torture, it just rubbed me the wrong way.

What changes could’ve been made to make this a better film?

Mark Boal naked and bruised in a dog collar, and he’s pleading …

Boal: How do I make this Oscar-nominated critically acclaimed piece of propaganda into a better movie? Please, help me.

Me: [after a long beat] You can help yourself by being truthful.

Will anyone give a shit in ten years? Should they?

I don’t think they have a choice. In the grand scheme of our species imperious legacy the ripples of pop culture—I predict—will prove more resonant than the historical record itself. Like it or not pop culture etches itself deep into our zeitgeist by naturally appealing to a primitive sense that (linked inextricably to eons of evolution) transcends temporal fictions like ‘law,’ ‘morality,’ and especially the institutions we elect to uphold them; what pop culture does best is that it plays chords universal to the strings of human emotion; it pulsates to timeless rhythms and in precise harmony with the percussion instrument that is the human heart. And here we are, an overly opinionated creature that spans the world and whose evolution can be relied upon to react to total horseshit so long as its catchy. And this movie is catchy. Like the hook to a pop song you just can’t get out of your head though you know its toxic to your jaded soul. The point is this: When you make a movie like this you are making a statement, one that will reverberate through generations and it will be remembered. For better or worse, Zero Dark Thirty, like the litany of human rights abuses it titillates us with and the many blunt blows its heroic and ‘tortured’ torturers callously inflict, is sure to leave a permanent mark.

___

___

___