In these heated days—when controversy seems to arise from everything that everyone does, all the time—the idea of a single movie inciting a fierce nationwide debate can seem like a relic of a naive and distant past. And yet, that’s exactly what happened just seven years ago upon the release of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s sweeping account of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. Already it’s easy to view the movie, what it depicts and the concerns it grapples with, as belonging to a recognizably different era in American history; as far as I can see, it hasn’t become newly insightful in the feverish, cranked-to-11 politics of today. But it’s worth revisiting now for many reasons: it remains as immersive and disturbing a piece of fact-based filmmaking as Hollywood has ever produced; it offers compelling insights about an episode of recent history that’s ongoing, with no end in sight; and the questions it explores, about morality and nationalized revenge, are just as relevant today as they were back then.
It’s worth noting what an outlier Zero Dark Thirty still is. Despite many significant developments in both politics and filmmaking over the past seven years, there’s never been a fiction film quite like it: written with such extensive access to sensitive material and directed with such close attention to realism, telling a true story so inherently thrilling and so emotionally significant to the target audience. It’s an epic—set all over the world, spanning nearly a full decade, and exploring timeless themes—but it’s also a ripped-from-the-headlines procedural that delves into the nitty-gritty of contemporary geopolitics. There’s so much to unpack here (I’m hard-pressed to think of a movie that packs more into 2 hours and 45 minutes) that it’s hard to know where to begin. But in any great movie, you can be sure that the opening will be highly significant, and this one is no exception.
Indeed, much of the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty centers on its infamous first half-hour, with its graphic portrayal of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation.’ But, crucially, the movie actually begins a few moments earlier, with a black screen and a short mélange of actual sound bites from 9/11, including a few stomach-turning clips of victims in the final moments of their lives. This brief prologue caused a good deal of controversy in itself, with critics claiming (reasonably, I think) that using the voices of the real victims in a fiction film, sometimes without the explicit consent of the families, is ethically dubious at best. But the sequence is undeniably powerful, and it serves an important purpose. 9/11 was such a paradigm-shifting event that it’s already mythologized in the American psyche—arguably ever since the government started invoking it to justify the War on Terror, and certainly at the time of Zero Dark Thirty’s release. The prologue forcefully reminds us what this increasingly abstract event actually entailed—the horror and the real-life tragedy.
Then it’s two years later, and we’re immersed in another whirlwind of human suffering as an unnervingly easygoing CIA agent named Dan (Jason Clarke) carries out a brutal interrogation. It’s convincingly established that Ammar (Reda Kateb, doing excellent work in the thankless role of the century), is somehow involved with al-Qaeda, yet it’s hard to imagine any decent person not feeling repulsed as the bruised, helpless detainee is waterboarded, deprived of sleep, sexually humiliated, and finally locked into a horribly small wooden box. This is the movie’s first signal that it’s not simply propaganda in support of such practices; it’s impossible to watch these scenes and conclude, as the Bush administration long tried to claim, that these techniques don’t constitute torture. Bigelow confirms that this is a textbook violation of human rights, while also reminding us of the incident that initially let us convince ourselves it was necessary. (Sure, Dick Cheney is enough of a cartoon villain that he probably wanted to do this stuff anyway, but he still needed something like 9/11 as a pretext.) So we have one atrocity, the torture of detainees, in response to another: the 9/11 attacks.[i] The basic arc of the narrative to come is so well known that we already have expectations about what sort of movie this will be: part espionage thriller, part combat picture. It has elements of both, but the opening makes clear that this is, first and foremost, a movie about revenge. And if there’s one part of the American soul that’s just as forcefully present today as it was back then, it’s the desire for revenge against those who cross us.
Like all the best revenge stories, Zero Dark Thirty uses its subject matter to examine some difficult themes—trauma, violence, obsession, and the moral cost of payback. It’s not surprising that so many people, especially those of us who consider the CIA’s use of torture a moral abomination, would be upset that the movie doesn’t present the hunt for bin Laden in a way that explicitly validates our position. That complaint is not unfounded, but it reflects an unwillingness to grapple with a deeply uncomfortable issue, not to mention a certain disdain for what film as an art form is capable of. If you’re willing to ascribe worth only to movies that reduce the mess of real life to a simplistic moral equation and come down on your side of it—well, all I’ll say is that you’re depriving yourself of most of the best movies ever made. One could claim, for instance, that The Godfather glorifies the Italian Mafia because it takes their point of view and depicts them as more than heartless monsters; that case is there to make. But people rarely do, because they realize that they’d have to ignore many significant elements of the movie, including most of what makes it interesting. Anyone who wants to dismiss Zero Dark Thirty as a nationalistic, torture-glorifying revenge fantasy can find everything they need to make that case, too.[ii] But that would be textbook bad analysis: determining the moral stance of a complex work based on a few offensive elements, and willfully disregarding pretty much everything else the movie says, shows, and implies.
Most attacks against the movie boil down to essentially this: that it depicts torture as a valuable tool in the hunt for bin Laden. There are many moments in the movie that support that idea, but if you’re willing to look deeper, you’ll find a great many others that challenge, confuse, or refute it. It’s true that in the beginning, Dan goes to work on Ammar with gusto, using exactly the sort of gloating, jingoistic language that advocates of torture might nod along with. Meanwhile, Maya (Jessica Chastain), the newly arrived analyst who will become our protagonist, is shaken by what she sees but does nothing to stop him, and coldly rebuffs Ammar’s pleas for help. It’s discomfiting because they’re supposedly on ‘our side,’ but it’s also sensible characterization—they’re committed front-line fighters in the War on Terror, and they’re also employees carrying out orders from their superiors. More importantly, though, nothing comes of it; Ammar ends up incoherently rattling off random days of the week when Dan asks him about the next attack, and then we cut to civilians being mowed down in Saudi Arabia as Dan and Maya watch the images on TV, stewing in their failure to stop it.
Of course, Ammar does finally produce a name: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a trusted al-Qaeda courier and the lead that Maya will eventually use to track down bin Laden. Once again, though, the role of torture is tricky—Ammar only gives it up when Dan and Maya sit him down, give him some food, and interrogate him without violence,[iii] and yet, he only does so because of Maya’s bluff, which relies on his disorientation after torture and the threat of more to come. But as the story progresses, we learn that the CIA already had the same information from other sources; we see Maya combing through old interrogation tapes in which multiple detainees (some under duress and some not) mention Abu Ahmed as well. It turns out that the CIA even has his real name—something even Ammar didn’t know—in a file that got lost in the early years after 9/11. We’ve seen how driven Maya and her colleagues are; it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have found it eventually. It’s never explicitly stated, but the implication is clear: torture played at least some role in Ammar’s confession, but the CIA could have found the same information using more orthodox methods, and probably would have done if they hadn’t been so caught up in spinning intelligence for the pointless Iraq war and torturing people for unreliable information.
The confession isn’t the only example that the movie’s detractors cite as evidence of a pro-torture stance. Much is made of the fact that later on, Maya herself presides over the torture of Abu Faraj, a senior al-Qaeda commander. But once again, it gets her exactly nowhere; in the very next scene, she’s frustrated and dismayed that it isn’t working. It’s also true that in the same scene, Dan warns Maya about the changing politics back home, advising her to be careful with the detainees lest she put her career in jeopardy. But, significantly, neither of them seems particularly disappointed or angry about this; although Dan insists he’s fine, he’s clearly troubled by the brutal things he’s done, to the point that he’s transferring back to Langley. In a sign of his growing disillusionment with the methods they’ve been using, he even declines her offer to interrogate Faraj himself. There’s another important moment soon afterwards, when we see the newly elected President Obama on TV, insisting that under his leadership, “America doesn’t torture.” Maya’s reaction is studiously hard to read. She doesn’t seem pleased or relieved, but neither does she sneer, throw up her hands, or hurl something at the screen—none of which would be out of character if she were outraged by this news. Instead her expression is neutral, contemplative, as if she’s simply thinking, “Well, I guess this is what we’re doing now.” The point is reiterated soon afterwards, when a CIA higher-up named George (Mark Strong) gathers Dan, Maya, and their colleagues together and rips them all a new one for doing such a terrible job finding terrorists. His language is bellicose (“Bring me people to kill!”), but his implied point is clear: what they’ve been doing up to now has failed miserably. And this is where they start making real progress—when they stop torturing detainees and devote themselves to the painstaking detective work of normal intelligence gathering: combing through files, tapping phones, cultivating local sources, and studying satellite imagery.
It’s complicated, though—it always is with Zero Dark Thirty—because the same character also has one of the movie’s most seemingly pro-torture lines. When the National Security Advisor demands proof that the mystery occupant of that famous house in Abbottabad is bin Laden and not some other criminal kingpin, a frustrated George complains: “You know we lost the ability to prove that when we lost the detainee program.” With a shrug, the Advisor replies, “You’ll think of something,” and it comes across as classic bureaucratic waffling. Except, George and the others do think of something; they do more research, come back with stronger evidence, and gradually convince the rest of intelligence community (and finally the unseen president) that their assessment is worth acting on. And in this they are hindered, not helped, by the fact that torture played a role in the initial confession. In a surprising reversal, Dan, the one who carried out the interrogation, is among those least convinced that the information is reliable. His doubts are reflected in the rest of the CIA brass, who offer only tentative agreement that bin Laden is really there. The implication is that if they’d found the house without torture (and we’ve seen that they could have) the decision to act might have been easier to make.
All of this is not to suggest that Zero Dark Thirty is really an anti-torture polemic in disguise. It may not glorify CIA torture in the way its detractors claim, but nor does it definitively show that such techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. Since the movie’s release, many people with detailed knowledge of the actual events have even asserted that it overstates the importance of torture, and I see no reason to doubt them. Indeed, there are moments that can’t be explained away, such as an early scene when Maya interrogates a former al-Qaeda financier, using the threat of extradition to Israel—and the certainty of torture there—as leverage. (No, she doesn’t use violence herself, but come on—the man literally says, “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question; I will answer.”) For me, the scene that best captures the movie’s split mindset comes later on. Dan meets with his boss, who complains about the political fallout in typically hawkish fashion: “Abu Ghraib and Gitmo fucked us,” “We’ve got senators jumping out of our asses,” etc. Dan agrees to take the heat for the program if necessary, but he does it to secure funds to bribe a Kuwaiti official for help with cell phone surveillance—in other words, to facilitate the normal, nonviolent intelligence gathering that he now recognizes as the more effective way forward.
The most that can be said is that Bigelow and Boal are clearly going to great lengths to preserve ambiguity on the issue of torture, and I think that’s because their intellectual goal is more sophisticated than to deliver a definitive ideological verdict. As we’ve mentioned, this is a revenge movie at its core. And revenge stories are all, in their own ways, about trauma and the victim’s response to it. What sets Zero Dark Thirty apart from other revenge movies is a question of scope. The filmmakers are exploring a phenomenon that’s common enough throughout history but still difficult to wrap one’s head around: trauma on a national scale, and a nationalized quest for vengeance. Film critic Andrew O’Hehir perfectly encapsulates the central issue that I think the movie is grappling with:
We have taken Dick Cheney’s famous taxi ride to the dark side, in search of justice or vengeance or whatever payback term you like. How has that worked out for us? What are the consequences of embracing not just the enemy’s tactics but the enemy’s essentially nihilistic worldview, in which the standards of universal morality that supposedly formed the basis of the Western world’s liberal revolutions simply do not matter?
Bigelow and Boal did not invent this problem out of nothing, people, and it’s not limited to the 9/11 era or the United States of America. Every single powerful nation throughout history, whether Western and supposedly enlightened or not, has used torture and brutality and state terror as instruments of policy, pretty much whenever it convinced itself it needed to. What has changed since, say, the end of the 18th century is that the great powers are now compelled to pay lip service to higher ideals and pretend that they never do such things, or to explain them away as aberrations perpetrated by rogue elements. When all else fails, there’s always the appeal to patriotism, still the last refuge of scoundrels, as it was to Samuel Johnson. We had to break the rules to “protect the homeland,” as characters repeatedly say in Zero Dark Thirty, which was approximately the rhetoric used to justify British torture in Northern Ireland, French torture in Algeria, American torture in Latin America and the Phillippines, and on and on.[iv]
The message I take from Bigelow and Boal is this: torture was a significant, ugly part of our reaction to the trauma of 9/11, so whether it played an essential role the manhunt or not, it has to be included in any serious examination of what that trauma has done to us. Bigelow herself said as much: “Do I wish [torture] was not part of that history? Yes. But it was.”[v] You don’t get to tell the story of our response to 9/11 and pretend this wasn’t part of it.
Bigelow and Boal really do something quite radical here: they take the most inherently cinematic story of the War on Terror, the one that would be easiest to spin into a simplistic tale of good vs. evil, and make it into one of the least triumphalist blockbusters Hollywood has ever released. For them, a movie about the War on Terror, even one depicting a clear American victory, should not leave us feeling triumphant or comfortable. With its docudrama cinematography, brisk pacing, and realistically unadorned production design, Zero Dark Thirty unfolds so naturally that it can seem like this story couldn’t have been filmed any other way. But at every turn, Bigelow makes conscious choices that inject a sense of discomfort into the proceedings. She skillfully walks a fine tonal tightrope: the movie is gripping but sobering, a story of success that’s almost relentlessly grim.
This is not to say that Bigelow completely neutralizes the story’s inherent appeal; her portrayal this rarefied world and the covert struggle taking place within it is appropriately engrossing and intense. It’s still thrilling when the characters discover a new piece of information, and the tradecraft, technological wizardry, and deductive reasoning they use to acquire and interpret it all is still fascinating and impressive. Yet at the same time, Bigelow creates an atmosphere of pervasive dread and doubt. Her principal characters are not like us; they’re zealous workaholics grasping for answers in a world of uncertainty and deception, with little evident connection to the civilian society that they’re ostensibly serving. The score is haunting and melancholy even at the most triumphant moments. The restless handheld camera keeps us on edge, moving skittishly through environments that bear little resemblance to our own: hectic Middle Eastern cities, blandly threatening military bases, and soulless office spaces. Bigelow expertly amplifies the sense of menace by focusing on odd, minute details: a rustling canopy, a single van wheel beginning to creep forward, the hem of a burkha shifting to reveal the black boots of an agent in disguise.
Nowhere is this duality more apparent than in the movie’s final half-hour, which meticulously reconstructs the Navy SEALs’ famous assault on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. Bigelow’s gifts as an action director are on full display in this remarkable sequence. She stages the raid almost in real time and largely without musical cues, forgoing typical action-movie flourishes in favor of unmitigated realism—she knows this incident needs no cinematic enhancement to make it riveting. She has a fantastic instinct for conveying space and motion, expertly cutting between close-ups and wider angles so that even as we witness a complex event with many moving parts, it’s always clear what’s going on. This is especially impressive when you consider that it’s shot almost entirely with handheld cameras and switches frequently between two distinct color schemes: the green glow of night vision goggles and the murky grays and blues of a moonless night. This nervous cinematography does much to create a sense of potential danger around every corner and behind every door; the scene is a masterwork of sustained tension despite the fact that most viewers already know how it’s going to end.
Most remarkable of all, however, is that even when squarely focused on physical reality and moment-to-moment action, Bigelow engages meaningfully with the larger themes. If there’s any part of the story that could be presented without much ambiguity, this is it: a dramatic, successful military action that the vast majority of Americans approve of, and are intensely curious about. There are certainly moments when the sequence functions in the expected way: as an expression of our collective fantasy of revenge against the mastermind of 9/11. Yet Bigelow never allows it to stay in that vein for long, using the facts of the mission and her own directorial discretion to create frequent counterpoints, yanking us out of the fantasy and complicating our sense of vicarious satisfaction.
So during the SEALs’ initial journey to the compound, Bigelow gives us what we want: stunning images of the stealth helicopters flying hair-raisingly low to avoid detection, skillfully intercut with the nervous SEALs inside and the operators back at the base to create a rhythmic, visceral sense of breakneck flight and mounting anticipation. But in doing so, she also draws our attention to the setting, painting a brief but vivid picture of the mountains between Afghnistan and Pakistan—a rugged, desolate landscape still largely untouched by human civilization. She highlights the fact that the SEALs are flying through one of the most historically significant mountain ranges in the world: the Spin Ghar range, and the larger Hindu Kush that it connects to, have formed a natural barrier and gateway between disparate civilizations since ancient times. Bird’s-eye views of the helicopters, tiny and indistinct against the mountains, invite us to consider this small skirmish as part of a much longer history of confrontation between East and West. Technology has changed the battlefield and the geopolitics are different, but there’s nothing new or original about our War on Terror; it’s just the latest iteration of a conflict that has existed in myriad forms for thousands of years.
The counterpoints are even more pronounced as the SEALs make their way through the compound. Bigelow places us right there on the ground alongside them, encouraging us to identify with them on a gut level—their panic during a chaotic helicopter crash; their nerves as they approach a doorway, unsure of what’s on the other side; and the adrenaline-fueled surge of action when an enemy emerges from the gloom. She gives us thrilling depictions of their bravery and skill, their cohesiveness as a unit and their composure under extreme stress, but she doesn’t shy away from the devastating results of their work, either. Repeatedly, tension builds to an instant of deadly confrontation, and the SEALs prevail, but it’s immediately followed by the consequences: sobbing children, screaming women, and the peculiar, sickening sound of silenced rifles pumping extra bullets into the body. Fittingly enough, we see it most clearly when the squad reaches the top floor of the house. A SEAL lurks in the stairwell and, as we’ve seen others do, calls out the name of the man he believes is hiding there: “Osama!” In our nationalized fantasy of payback for 9/11, this is where everyone most wants to be, and Bigelow knows it. She shoots directly over his shoulder and down his rifle as he scans the doorways, as close to his point of view as we can get. A few of the SEALs have become readily identifiable by now, but this guy isn’t one of them, and with dim glints of light reflecting off the four separate lenses of his night vision goggles, he seems almost more cyborg than human—an anonymous, avenging avatar onto which any American can project themselves. But what happens next isn’t exactly rousing: just a creaking door, a muffled gunshot, a body slumping to the floor, and the family’s anguished cries. All we see of the world’s worst terrorist is a flash of furtive motion in a doorway and a lifeless body absorbing extra bullets. When the moment of vengeance comes, it’s not an epic showdown with evil incarnate, just a man being skillfully murdered in his bedroom. We don’t see the celebrations in the streets back home, and there are no cheers from the operators back at the base. Even the SEALs are pretty subdued, at least in the immediate aftermath; when they do celebrate later on, it mostly comes across as the ‘holy shit we made it!’ kind of triumph.
In another significant move, Bigelow doesn’t present bin Laden’s death as the climax of the sequence. There is faint background music as the SEALs hastily exit the compound, but the true end of the raid—the moment of transition from hyperrealism back into standard cinematic storytelling, with its necessary distortions of space and time—is clearly signaled when the score suddenly returns to dominate the soundtrack. And that doesn’t happen when bin Laden is killed, or when the last SEALs leave the compound. Instead, the score returns when they blow up the downed helicopter—a controlled demolition to protect military secrets. The music that rises up is melancholy, almost spooky, and after such a protracted fast-paced sequence, Bigelow lingers for a notably long time on shots of the burning wreck, mining this actual event for symbolic import and driving home a crucial point: we may have prevailed, but we haven’t come out unscathed. We’ve gotten the vengeance we were after, but we’ve lost something, too.
That message is everywhere in Zero Dark Thirty—never explicitly stated, but subtly telegraphed in character interactions, implied in framing choices and musical cues, and vividly embodied in the main character, Maya. The movie’s detractors often point to her lack of scruples about the use of torture and her occasional slides into jingoism as evidence of the movie’s bad faith. But depiction is not the same as endorsement, and a protagonist (even one brilliantly portrayed by a talented actress) is not the same as a heroine. In this story, we are definitively on one side and against the other, but no one is pure enough to be considered a straightforward hero, least of all Maya. Bigelow and Chastain invite us to admire her intelligence and resolve, and to sympathize with her uphill struggle as the only woman in an organization run by men. But she’s relatable only insofar as she’s seeking the revenge that we crave; the movie emphatically does not present her as someone we should aspire to be. Even in the all-consuming profession of espionage, she’s singularly alone, with no romantic life and, as one colleague sympathetically observes, no real friends at all. She presumably has some family, but as portrayed in the movie, she never even thinks about them. The one time we see her socializing, she talks about work, and the scene ends with a harrowing explosion. She has no life outside of her job—even eating and sleeping are annoying chores that get in her way.
We still root for her as she tries to convince her wary superiors to act, but that’s largely because we already know she’s right. Imagine yourself as one of her colleagues, trying to work with her without the benefit of hindsight, and she starts to look different: intractable and unpleasant, if not downright ornery, and obsessively attached to a pet theory that’s far from ironclad. We share her frustration when Dan questions the intelligence; he seems to be cynically trying save his own skin by making his views conform to political changes. But if you think about it, his doubt makes perfect sense: we’ve seen two separate occasions where he tortured detainees and got nothing out of it—there were presumably many more. The same is true when Maya argues with her boss Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), demanding more resources to track bin Laden’s courier. She has more passion and better rhetoric, but he has the better argument. Without the knowledge that she’s right, his assessment that she’s “chasing a ghost while the whole fucking network goes all around [her]” sounds pretty spot-on.
This is a character often lionized in the movies: the hyper-competent warrior/civil servant who lives only for their work. But Bigelow is clear-eyed about how easily such deep commitment can drift over into fanaticism. In another pitch for more resources, Maya implores a colleague: “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so I can finish the job.” Unless you’re the sort of person who views our adventures in the Middle East as a righteous resuscitation of the Crusades,[vi] that line makes you uncomfortable, and it’s meant to, because our protagonist is starting to sound disconcertingly similar to the people she’s fighting. Apart from showing a dark side to Maya’s zeal, this crucial line suggests that the War on Terror, and the hunt for bin Laden in particular, contains more of an element of ‘holy war’ than we’d perhaps like to admit. Most of us would balk at the idea of a grand struggle between Christianity and Islam, but religions aren’t the only things that a society can hold sacred. For us, it’s more often about principles: democracy, personal liberty, happiness through consumerism and mass wealth. If there’s anything that unites the vast majority of Americans—especially when the movie was released, before the current shitstorm—it’s a deep-seated belief that we know the right way to live, and one of the driving forces behind the War on Terror is an urge (admitted or not) to spread that gospel to supposedly less enlightened areas of the world. Zero Dark Thirty suggests that in the final analysis, our endeavor is not so different from our enemy’s, and ultimately just as futile.
The movie’s final shots definitively quash any lingering sense of triumph, with Maya sitting alone in a cavernous military transport plane, finally letting her roiling emotions bubble to the surface. She’s an embodiment of America in its quest for revenge: deeply committed, but also obsessive to the point of misery and ill health, moral compass blown to bits, alone and directionless once it’s over. Not for nothing is the movie’s final line, “So, where do you want to go?” We fought brutal wars, adopted our enemy’s cruelty and disregard for innocent life, spent thousands of man hours and literally unimaginable sums of money, killed god knows how many people and sacrificed many of our own—all to kill one man who, by the time we get him, hasn’t been a serious threat to the country for years. Zero Dark Thirty wrestles with a crucial question: Was it worth it? On the level of instinctive patriotism, of course it was. He was the mastermind of 9/11; we’d do anything to get that bastard! Fine, the movie says, here’s what that looks like, up close and in human terms. Do you still think it was worth it? We got our revenge, but are we really better off? I think you’d have to ignore an awful lot of this movie to claim that Bigelow and Boal’s answer is yes. During the SEALs’ frantic evacuation of the house, the camera lingers on two significant images. We see a pool of blood on the floor of bin Laden’s bedroom, and a room full of computers and filing cabinets, only partially ransacked for valuable intelligence—the pitiable side of our revenge, and its ultimately negligible impact on the broader conflict.
Politics have changed, but Zero Dark Thirty is just as thought-provoking today as it was when it came out. It’s not always easy to watch, but it’s an achievement that deserves to be remembered: an entertaining and immersive thriller that also manages to explore difficult issues with uncommon depth. It’s a masterful piece of cinematic craft, and it will eventually be a valuable historical document, partly for its nuanced depiction of what happened, and partly for the way it captures the mindset of a nation lashing out in response to trauma. It shows us who we are, what we did and what it did to us—raw, unfiltered by ideology, without the comfort of a simple moral judgment.
No wonder it pissed so many people off. ◊
© Harrison Swan, 2019
[i] Bigelow and Boal don’t delve into the thorny history behind that one—after all, there’s only so much one movie can do—but anyone with a passing knowledge of the Middle East knows that 9/11 didn’t come out of nowhere, either.
[ii] Glenn Greenwald, an astute and talented investigative journalist, does so very articulately here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
[iii] Manohla Dargis makes this point well, in this excellent review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/movies/jessica-chastain-in-zero-dark-thirty.html
[iv] Read the rest of this exceptionally thoughtful and incisive review here: https://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/pick_of_the_week_kathryn_bigelows_mesmerizing_post_911_nightmare/
[v] https://www.thewrap.com/zero-dark-thirty-steps-line-fire-answers-critics-68781/
[vi] And if you are, then pretty much everything about this movie probably looks very different from the way I’ve discussed it.
ReWatch List 