Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

[LQ]

Zero Dark Thirty

[tarpilot]

While I'm fairly confident it won't cross over into unwatchably horrendous Green Zone territory, I don't see Bigelow ever returning to the level that produced the (near-)masterpieces she did from The Loveless to Strange Days

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha I love Point Break but 'near-masterpiece' isn't a phrase that comes to mind to describe it

[warren oates]

Near Dark is a great film, but The Hurt Locker is also very good and, lead casting choice aside, her submarine film had a lot of interesting moments, like the reactor repair sequence. What I'm trying to say is: She knows how to make movies about the military better than most. Her focus on procedure, Hawksian camraderie and core values like bravery should serve her well this time around. I don't see what this has to do with Green Zone as the true story elements of this film are much more precise and inherently compelling (finding the biggest someone of all as opposed to finding nothing) and the writing talent of Bigelow's film can scribe circles around Green Zone's second-choice screenwriter (Tom Stoppard was too busy). So, yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

[karmajuice]

I'm interested in the film, but that is a terrible trailer.

[LQ]

I'm interested in the film, but that is a terrible trailer.

Probably should've added a caveat that the trailer I posted is being billed as a teaser, or "First Official" trailer. I'm sure we'll get something a little more fleshed-out closer to the film's release.

[mfunk9786]

Teaser poster is out, so since this is a pretty major release, I figured it was thread time. Here's the link to the trailer, and the poster is below. Mods, there are posts about this film in the trailers thread if you want to swing them over, too.

[colinr0380]

There are apparently going to be DLC Zero Dark Thirty tie-in maps in the latest installment of the Medal of Honor series.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Latest Trailer

[flyonthewall2983]

What I wanna know, is did they get the guy who played Fletch's boss to play Bin Laden?

[warren oates]

Okay, I went against all my instincts and my usual policy and watched the new trailer for a film I'm eager to see. Having read no less than three nonfiction books about the Bin Laden raid in the past week, let me say first of all how accurate it already feels to me, at least in the tiniest, most intangible details.

Spoiler

The way the house looks from the ground in that last brief teaser of the final assault. Or, for instance, the fact that most Navy SEALs look a good deal more/carry themselves more like Joel Edgerton in this clip than the images of pumped up Hollywood action stars we've seen in the past. Or the strict fidelity to the model on whom the Jessica Chastain character is obviously based, a young tough and yet still quite feminine CIA analyst the books I've read refer to as "Jen."

For the short amount of time they've had to ramp this production up and the incredible expectations that come with a project like this, I'd say, at least cautiously: so far, so good.

[Jeff]

This started screening for long-lead critics last week and the embargo is over today. The first two reviews are flat out raves.

It could well be the most impressive film Bigelow has made, as well as possibly her most personal, as one keenly feels the drive of the filmmaker channeled through the intensity of Maya's character. The film's power steadily and relentlessly builds over its long course, to a point that is terrifically imposing and unshakable.

First and last, Zero Dark Thirty is a movie, and a damned fine one. Like Argo — which, with all due respect to director Ben Affleck and the film’s many admirers, ZDT blows out of the water — it dramatizes a true-life international adventure with CIA agents as the heroes. (And it takes fewer fictional liberties with the source material than Affleck did.) In the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Boal tracked down the particulars of a sensational exploit and, skipping the “non-fiction novel” stage, created an original screenplay that provides a streamlined timeline of the hunt for bin Laden. The word “docudrama” doesn’t hint at Boal’s achievement. This is movie journalism that snaps and stings, that purifies a decade’s clamor and clutter into narrative clarity, with a salutary kick.

It starts screening for other critics and guilds today, so expect lots more reviews popping up. The early pieces make it pretty clear that this is The Jessica Chastain Show. It sounds like we can expect her to give Jennifer Lawrence a run for her money in all the Best Actress races this year.

I can't wait to see this film. A little disappointed that they fiddled with the release schedule. It's now NY/LA only on December 21, and doesn't go wide until January 11.

[TheDudeAbides]

This started screening for long-lead critics last week and the embargo is over today. The first two reviews are flat out raves.

It could well be the most impressive film Bigelow has made, as well as possibly her most personal, as one keenly feels the drive of the filmmaker channeled through the intensity of Maya's character. The film's power steadily and relentlessly builds over its long course, to a point that is terrifically imposing and unshakable.

First and last, Zero Dark Thirty is a movie, and a damned fine one. Like Argo — which, with all due respect to director Ben Affleck and the film’s many admirers, ZDT blows out of the water — it dramatizes a true-life international adventure with CIA agents as the heroes. (And it takes fewer fictional liberties with the source material than Affleck did.) In the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Boal tracked down the particulars of a sensational exploit and, skipping the “non-fiction novel” stage, created an original screenplay that provides a streamlined timeline of the hunt for bin Laden. The word “docudrama” doesn’t hint at Boal’s achievement. This is movie journalism that snaps and stings, that purifies a decade’s clamor and clutter into narrative clarity, with a salutary kick.

It starts screening for other critics and guilds today, so expect lots more reviews popping up. The early pieces make it pretty clear that this is The Jessica Chastain Show. It sounds like we can expect her to give Jennifer Lawrence a run for her money in all the Best Actress races this year.

I can't wait to see this film. A little disappointed that they fiddled with the release schedule. It's now NY/LA only on December 21, and doesn't go wide until January 11.

Oh boy! I'm officially excited now! Man, I can't wait to see this.

But I too am disappointed at the fumbling of the release, but I still can't wait to see this badboy.

Based upon its release, is it still available for academy award contention? (Not that it really matters )

[mfunk9786]

December is a month, too.

[rs98762001]

It's pretty impressive stuff. Strangely enough the part that left me cold was the final assault (which only makes up the last 25 minutes of the film). Maybe that's because the details of the raid were already so familiar from other accounts, while the rest of the film - although I cannot make any claims for its general veracity - was so much more eye-opening and fascinating. There's a sequence in the middle with Jennifer Ehle that's as agonizingly tense as anything in The Hurt Locker. I think Bigelow's previous film probed a little deeper in terms of character, but ZDT is still extremely compelling. There's little of Argo's third-act Hollywood heroics.

[Sonmi451]

It is so disconcerting to see that almost no one, anywhere, is talking about the recent slate of films (especially Bigelow's recent work, so lauded) that are unapologetically promoting mindless support for U.S. imperial militarism abroad. The level of systemic propaganda has become so refined, that many thinking people don't even recognize it when they see it. The standard method used to be to simply portray the "enemy" as a monstrous caricature (i.e. The Deer Hunter). Now it is enough to merely empathize with the terrible plight our honorable men and women are facing, while trying to keep the world safe for democracy. It has been said, that if a film is not explicitly anti-war in its outlook, then it is implicitly pro-war. The Bigelow team likes to say that her films are "apolitical", but in order to portray unjust and illegal imperial ambitions abroad as non-political, one must consciously misrepresent the nature of the reality.

[flyonthewall2983]

What other movies would you use as examples, barring her recent work. As for this film in particular (which I haven't seen yet), I'm failing to see how capturing and killing Bin Laden has these imperial ambitions you speak of.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, Argo is the other big one I've seen cited there- any movie that has CIA operatives as heroic characters is automatically making some assumptions about how one feels about the goals and practices of American foreign policy.

[warren oates]

Now it is enough to merely empathize with the terrible plight our honorable men and women are facing, while trying to keep the world safe for democracy.

Huh. I thought that was Bigelow's approach? Certainly it is in The Hurt Locker, where the politics and lies of how the U.S. got into Iraq have about as much to do with the story as Martians. It's a small-picture view of war from the perspective of a foot solider attempting to do his very dangerous duty and survive. It ignores imperialism the same way that it ignores My Little Pony -- out of sheer irrelevance to the story it's chosen to tell.

It has been said, that if a film is not explicitly anti-war in its outlook, then it is implicitly pro-war.

Who said it? Why did they think the passive voice would help sell their unattributed quotation? Why do you agree with this facile reasoning?

The Bigelow team likes to say that her films are "apolitical", but in order to portray unjust and illegal imperial ambitions abroad as non-political, one must consciously misrepresent the nature of the reality.

In your formulation it would become almost impossible to make small-picture film about any institution anywhere in the past, present or future, being that most civic, political, corporate and religious bodies have at one point or another been a party to egregious injustices. As if a film about a genuinely good Catholic monk would instantly be invalidated because of its failure to acknowledge the Church's myriad misdeeds. Come to think of it, yeah, f--- The Flowers of St. Francis!

[JMULL222]

ZERO DARK THIRTY is either an extended criticism of American imperialism or a detached look at a grand act of American heroism. Or something else. It's really up to you on this one. That's what makes it great.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'd rather a war film be as detached from it's politics as much as possible, and just be about the day-to-day stuff. This was most evident when I saw both The Hurt Locker and Green Zone within a couple of months of each other. The very last thing I thought about when I saw the former was whether we had any right to be there, whereas the latter bashes you over the head with this question for the entire film.

[hearthesilence]

The notion that any American film made today with an Iraqi setting could possibly be apolitical in any shape or form strikes me as being extremely naïve and myopic. Secondly, I can’t imagine what could make the notion of an apolitical film on this subject sound even remotely attractive. Are we really that helpless and hopeless? And are we so blinkered in our perceptions of what politics consists of that we think it’s limited to how we vote in elections? (Spoiler ahead, so if you haven’t yet seen the film, you might want to stop reading here.)

This is a film whose most courageous character is shown to be myopic to the point of insanity when it comes to perceiving Iraqi people in his midst — or at least one Iraqi kid in particular whom he supposedly knows and has some fondness for. He’s so convinced that this kid has been killed by a terrorist that he can’t even see the kid greeting him. This kind of blindness surely implies something about American perceptions of the Iraqi people, the ones whom American soldiers have allegedly been fighting for. It even, I would argue, implies something political.

[warren oates]

The notion that any American film made today with an Iraqi setting could possibly be apolitical in any shape or form strikes me as being extremely naïve and myopic. Secondly, I can’t imagine what could make the notion of an apolitical film on this subject sound even remotely attractive. Are we really that helpless and hopeless? And are we so blinkered in our perceptions of what politics consists of that we think it’s limited to how we vote in elections? (Spoiler ahead, so if you haven’t yet seen the film, you might want to stop reading here.)

This is a film whose most courageous character is shown to be myopic to the point of insanity when it comes to perceiving Iraqi people in his midst — or at least one Iraqi kid in particular whom he supposedly knows and has some fondness for. He’s so convinced that this kid has been killed by a terrorist that he can’t even see the kid greeting him. This kind of blindness surely implies something about American perceptions of the Iraqi people, the ones whom American soldiers have allegedly been fighting for. It even, I would argue, implies something political.

So this is offered as proof of what besides the fact that a critic whose greatest strength/weakness is that he sees everything as always already inherently political also, surprise, sees The Hurt Locker as political? Rosenbaum can make of the lamest subplot in the film whatever he wants, but, political allegory for American myopia or not, that's not really what the whole of the film is about.

[knives]

It is an aspect that is featured in the film whether that is intended as the focus or not and he does give good reasoning of his points. Now I don't find what he said to inherently be a bad thing so maybe that's where we are spitting.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think it's worth distinguishing between making a Political Film wherein the characters have extended monologues intended to make clear the viewpoint of the filmmakers and a film set in an environment where simply depicting a given narrative has inevitable political consequences- particularly in choosing who will be represented as fully human and who won't, but also in terms of how much people actually know, what motivates them, how honest they are in their dealings, which tactics work, etc. I think Rosenbaum's right and that any movie set in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else with American troops focused on Americans is going to be inherently a political work, and trying to be apolitical might simply mean trying not to piss anybody off (which is a fool's game, and dishonest besides.)

I haven't seen The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, but it's not my impression that Bigelow's attempt to avoid politics is in the 'don't make waves' vein. I do think that Warren Oates' analogy between a depiction of heroic soldiers or heroic CIA agents and the heroism of St. Francis doesn't entirely work, though- the way in which Francis's heroism is enacted is essentially a commentary on the materialism and acquisitiveness that developed around the the Medieval Church, and it critiques that style of religion by depicting a better and more decent way of living a religious life. The modern equivalent would be something more like Serpico, something that depicts non-conformist heroism, not someone keeping their head down and working within a bad system to accomplish goals of dubious value.