Rate The Last Movie You Saw

I don't think I have to remind anyone by now that, before it became the punchline for multiple Family Guy gags (some of them even good!), 9/11 was the definition of a watershed, earth-shaking moment, not just in American history, but the entire world's as well. However, in addition to the tremendous historical impact of that September morn, it also holds a certain personal importance for me, as, while I fortunately didn't lose anyone in the attacks, it still happened after I had just become a teenager, which makes it feels like the unofficial dividing line between when I was a "kid", and when I became an "adult", as the world became a much scarier place after it; I mean, how could I and an entire generation of Americans not be traumatized by what was our version of Peal Harbor, as we were pulled out of class to watch the firey deaths of thousands of our fellow countrymen on live TV? However, as our nation rushed to obtain some sort of vengeance, the fallout from that response has proved to be grotesquely overblown, as the deaths of 3,000 people doesn't justify the displacement of over 30 million, or the deaths of over half a million, many of whom were innocent, making the so-called "War On Terror" one without the relatively clear-cut good or bad guys of certain previous conflicts, and rendering it far more difficult for Hollywood's nuance-hostile industry to churn out its inevitable dramatizations. However, with 2012's Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow not only attempted such a dramatization, but also succeeded extremely well (although that's not a huge surprise, considering that her previous effort was The Hurt Locker), resulting in a film that's not only a superb, true-life espionage Thriller, but also the current peak of the director's late career renaissance.

It tells the story of the hunt for bin Laden through the lens of "Maya", a green CIA operative who was recruited fresh out of high school, who, over the course of the film's 2 & 1/2 hours, slowly grows from being just one more small cog in a massive bureaucratic machine, to being the main driver of the hunt herself, as she obsessively digs through mountains of digital data, goes from anonymous, grime-covered "black site" to anonymous, grime-covered black site, and becomes an increasingly willing participant in various, dehumanizing forms of physical & psychological torture, as the stakes become increasingly personal for her, and she comes to display a pathological, quasi-religious fervor for hunting bin Laden, one that borders on being just as fanatical as the actual religious fervor of the terrorists themselves.

Of course, I have to address the elephant that's been in the room since the film's release, which is that it takes a "pro-torture" stance, which strikes me as cherry-picking, and part of a justified backlash against the American war machine that has nonetheless been misdirected at the film itself. I think this is obvious when the film shows multiple times that beating, force-feeding, and waterboarding prisoners is not only unable to consistently produce reliable intel, but also fails to prevent an actual attack in one case, which feels like a defusal of the theoretical "ticking-clock" scenarios that right-wingers loved to spew on Fox "News". In addition, you also have to consider the film's portrayal of the torture itself, which, rather than glossing over it, chooses to magnify it instead, with the lingering close-ups of one detainee in particular's filthy, bloody face, especially as he violently vomits up water, making the film an extremely uncomfortable watch, especially if you viewed it in a packed theater like I did. And finally, while this is outside the "text" of the film itself, I'm still skeptical of the idea that the film's screenwriter, Mark Boal, intended it as some sort of pro-torture cheerleading, considering that he wrote it at the same time he was working on an article about American war crimes, with the humanization of Maya and her co-workers when they're off the job not feeling like an endorsement of their "on the clock" actions, but a way to emphasize the level of sociopathy required to torture people for a living, while still functioning as a human being.

Anyway, as for the film's overall portrayal of the manhunt itself, ZDT does a superb job of conveying just enough of the maddening minutiae so we can grasp how knotty and dizzying a tangle that the world's biggest needle in a haystack search was, while also avoiding becoming unnecessarily bogged down in those details, with the rapid-fire, globe-trotting jumps between locations, intense handheld camerawork, and Bigelow's sharp, tense direction helping to cut through all the potentially confusing intelligence community jargon and bureaucratic back room meetings, in order to create a engaging, thrilling experience on the whole, with references to shifts in the political landscape to keep us grounded in the timeline, as well as occasional asides to portray real acts of terrorism, driving home the urgency of hunting down the man who's continuing to inspire those acts.

Finally, as for the film's moral stance on the "War On Terror", its overall viewpoint is appropriately as muddy as the war itself, as it refuses to turn a blind eye to the brutality of the conflict, and never strings up easy strawmen, but presents multiple perspectives in a solid fashion, too solidly to be interpreted in good faith as taking any one side, as Maya, though portrayed as being admirably iron-willed at times, still seems to hunt for bin Laden less as an act of collective justice for 9/11, and more for the personal vengeance of a colleague of that was killed in a suicide bombing. And, even then, neither Maya or us get to feel any final sense of fulfillment, as the climatic, half-hour raid sequence, a masterclass in glacial, nerve-wracking tension on its own terms, still takes us back to square zero with the lingering, haunting image of another aircraft on fire, bringing the events full circle, and hinting at an endless, ever-perpetuating cycle of violence as a result. And, even after Maya has personally glimpsed the corpse of bin Laden himself, this closure still fails to bring her peace, with her hunt for him being all she's lived for the past decade, and, when a pilot asks her where she wants to go after, she tellingly doesn't (or can't?) answer his question, as she stares blankly off into space, and a tear runs down her exhausted face, as we abruptly cut to black.

Best Moment:

I don't think I have to remind anyone by now that, before it became the punchline for multiple Family Guy gags (some of them even good!), 9/11 was the definition of a watershed, earth-shaking moment, not just in American history, but the entire world's as well. However, in addition to the tremendous historical impact of that September morn, it also holds a certain personal importance for me, as, while I fortunately didn't lose anyone in the attacks, it still happened after I had just become a teenager, which makes it feels like the unofficial dividing line between when I was a "kid", and when I became an "adult", as the world became a much scarier place after it; I mean, how could I and an entire generation of Americans not be traumatized by what was our version of Peal Harbor, as we were pulled out of class to watch the firey deaths of thousands of our fellow countrymen on live TV? However, as our nation rushed to obtain some sort of vengeance, the fallout from that response has proved to be grotesquely overblown, as the deaths of 3,000 people doesn't justify the displacement of over 30 million, or the deaths of over half a million, many of whom were innocent, making the so-called "War On Terror" one without the relatively clear-cut good or bad guys of certain previous conflicts, and rendering it far more difficult for Hollywood's nuance-hostile industry to churn out its inevitable dramatizations. However, with 2012's Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow not only attempted such a dramatization, but also succeeded extremely well (although that's not a huge surprise, considering that her previous effort was The Hurt Locker), resulting in a film that's not only a superb, true-life espionage Thriller, but also the current peak of the director's late career renaissance.

It tells the story of the hunt for bin Laden through the lens of "Maya", a green CIA operative who was recruited fresh out of high school, who, over the course of the film's 2 & 1/2 hours, slowly grows from being just one more small cog in a massive bureaucratic machine, to being the main driver of the hunt herself, as she obsessively digs through mountains of digital data, goes from anonymous, grime-covered "black site" to anonymous, grime-covered black site, and becomes an increasingly willing participant in various, dehumanizing forms of physical & psychological torture, as the stakes become increasingly personal for her, and she comes to display a pathological, quasi-religious fervor for hunting bin Laden, one that borders on being just as fanatical as the actual religious fervor of the terrorists themselves.

Of course, I have to address the elephant that's been in the room since the film's release, which is that it takes a "pro-torture" stance, which strikes me as cherry-picking, and part of a justified backlash against the American war machine that has nonetheless been misdirected at the film itself. I think this is obvious when the film shows multiple times that beating, force-feeding, and waterboarding prisoners is not only unable to consistently produce reliable intel, but also fails to prevent an actual attack in one case, which feels like a defusal of the theoretical "ticking-clock" scenarios that right-wingers loved to spew on Fox "News". In addition, you also have to consider the film's portrayal of the torture itself, which, rather than glossing over it, chooses to magnify it instead, with the lingering close-ups of one detainee in particular's filthy, bloody face, especially as he violently vomits up water, making the film an extremely uncomfortable watch, especially if you viewed it in a packed theater like I did. And finally, while this is outside the "text" of the film itself, I'm still skeptical of the idea that the film's screenwriter, Mark Boal, intended it as some sort of pro-torture cheerleading, considering that he wrote it at the same time he was working on an article about American war crimes, with the humanization of Maya and her co-workers when they're off the job not feeling like an endorsement of their "on the clock" actions, but a way to emphasize the level of sociopathy required to torture people for a living, while still functioning as a human being.

Anyway, as for the film's overall portrayal of the manhunt itself, ZDT does a superb job of conveying just enough of the maddening minutiae so we can grasp how knotty and dizzying a tangle that the world's biggest needle in a haystack search was, while also avoiding becoming unnecessarily bogged down in those details, with the rapid-fire, globe-trotting jumps between locations, intense handheld camerawork, and Bigelow's sharp, tense direction helping to cut through all the potentially confusing intelligence community jargon and bureaucratic back room meetings, in order to create a engaging, thrilling experience on the whole, with references to shifts in the political landscape to keep us grounded in the timeline, as well as occasional asides to portray real acts of terrorism, driving home the urgency of hunting down the man who's continuing to inspire those acts.

Finally, as for the film's moral stance on the "War On Terror", its overall viewpoint is appropriately as muddy as the war itself, as it refuses to turn a blind eye to the brutality of the conflict, and never strings up easy strawmen, but presents multiple perspectives in a solid fashion, too solidly to be interpreted in good faith as taking any one side, as Maya, though portrayed as being admirably iron-willed at times, still seems to hunt for bin Laden less as an act of collective justice for 9/11, and more for the personal vengeance of a colleague of that was killed in a suicide bombing. And, even then, neither Maya or us get to feel any final sense of fulfillment, as the climatic, half-hour raid sequence, a masterclass in glacial, nerve-wracking tension on its own terms, still takes us back to square zero with the lingering, haunting image of another aircraft on fire, bringing the events full circle, and hinting at an endless, ever-perpetuating cycle of violence as a result. And, even after Maya has personally glimpsed the corpse of bin Laden himself, this closure still fails to bring her peace, with her hunt for him being all she's lived for the past decade, and, when a pilot asks her where she wants to go after, she tellingly doesn't (or can't?) answer his question, as she stares blankly off into space, and a tear runs down her exhausted face, as we abruptly cut to black.

Best Moment: