On DVD now: Zero Dark Thirty

 We’d been eagerly awaiting this movie, so much hype and controversy, who wouldn’t want to see it?

But here’s the problem.

It purports to be based on actual firsthand accounts of actual events. That’s quite a burden. Rarely do actual firsthand accounts of actual events make a good movie. ‘Based on a true story’ is much, much easier.  

For those three or four of you that haven’t heard about this film, it’s about the CIA's hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Spoiler alert, they find him and kill him.

And that’s part of the difficulty, we already know most of the story, and we certainly know how it ends, now, entertain us.

I swim often in the pool called ‘creative non-fiction’. I write essays, some that have been published in actual books, that are based on true stories but have been enhanced, embellished, to make the stories more entertaining.  Some of the stories I’ve written have been almost entirely true, some contain only a tiny shard of a real story.

Hint: If my story contains witty banter or engaging dialogue, then that part is almost certainly manufactured, real people in real life don’t talk like they do in print. Well, maybe I do, but nobody else does.

We in the business call this ‘creative non-fiction’ which is code for ‘tall tale based thinly on fact.’

Life, real life, is rarely interesting on its own merits, conversations and interactions. Even intense, important, historical events are laced with great big heaps of nothing especially interesting happening.

Take D-Day. Most of the soldiers, sailors and Marines that were involved in the monumental, unprecedented and enormous invasion of Nazi occupied Europe spent months, months, doing virtually nothing but waiting. Whenever we see a movie with that much waiting around involved, the producers tend to skip over the enormous part, or enhance it with a little comic relief, usually guys playing poker in the bowels of a ship until a fight breaks out. Not that the card game and the fight didn’t happen, it’s just not likely that that particular set of guys played cards and started a fight, if those guys really existed in the first place.

But if you are going to make a movie that says it is based on true, firsthand accounts, then your embellishment options are limited by your stated fact-based, eye witnessed  story.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, this is exactly where the controversy came from.

We saw the ‘good guys’, the CIA, physically torturing detainees. Water torture, sleep deprivation, culture-based humiliation. In one scene a man is stripped naked in front of a woman, had a dog collar and leash attached to his neck and was forced to crawl around in front of her. In certain cultures this is about as bad as it can get. Not necessarily for Americans and Europeans as I’ve seen lots of movies and been to a few parties that included men being stripped naked in front of, and often by, women and led around on a leash. You know what I’m talking about. But for some cultures this sort of behavior is perceived as a bad thing.

There is nothing, nothing, in this movie we haven’t seen depicted thousands of times before in fiction movies and TV shows. So it’s not the actions themselves that caused the uproar, it’s the fact that these things are now being presented as things that we, the good guys, actually did to other humans.

Some of the same people that cheered on the fictional Jack Bauer in ‘24’ as he opened up some horrendous whoop-ass on alleged terrorists, or who absolutely delighted when Rambo or some other fictional character meted out violent, absolute vengeance, single-handedly as judge, jury and executioner, now find themselves protesting that sort of behavior.

It’s pure duplicity. We want our fictional heroes to do horrific things, but not our real heroes. Torture is apparently okay as long as there’s nothing actually at stake. However, in the real world, when real lives have been lost and more real horror is threatened, it’s inhumane.

I’m not saying torture is okay. I admit mixed/flawed/inconsistent emotions on the issue.

But this movie was dealing with first-hand accounts of things that many now perceive as atrocities.

So there’s vicious torture early on, though filtered through the lens of hindsight and good intentions.

Ten years post-9/11 it is easy to Monday-morning quarterback the actions of our government. The film makes certain tacit apologies through facial expressions and muted conversations about mixed/evolving feelings of the apparently repentant/regretful  torturers after a few years have passed and politics back home have evolved.

The film spans seven or eight years. There are huge gaps where apparently very little actually happened. You know, like in real life.

So the movie skips ahead several years, several times. The characters though, never age. I’m not even sure they even changed clothes during these long blank periods.

The story follows a female CIA agent, Maya, who for reasons we are never quite made aware of, is considered an expert in the hunt for Bin Laden. According to her own words, Bin Laden is all she has worked on for entire career, nothing else, since her recruitment out of high school. (This is mentioned, but never really explained either.)

Maya pushes, begs, pleads, humiliates and strong-arms her less-enthusiastic bosses, a career strategy that could only ever work in government employment circles, and finally gets her way. A raid is ordered up, the imperfect, wobbly, top-secret stealth helicopter prototypes are loaded up and SEAL Team Six does the dirty needful.

There is no real ‘rest-of-the-story’ aspect to this film. We don’t really learn anything new. There are no great reveals in this flick, it is simply a story that we’ve all heard before, played out on the big screen.

Even the raid itself is not very revealing as it takes place mostly in the dark. Shadows move from room to room, violent noises erupt around every dark corner. The entire raid takes place on screen in either disorienting stroboscopic bright flashes in otherwise pitch-black surroundings, or through that nauseating dim green we have come to equate with the world as seen through night-vision goggles. If this segment were security tape footage of a crime, no one would ever be convicted of anything given the poor angles and low resolution. But it is done as a shaky, fast-paced and erratic ‘as-if-you-were-there’ event which gives you the feeling of very high tension.

The casting was excellent, as it didn’t overshadow the film or the story. The story itself was rather shaky and skippy though. If this were a work of fiction, it probably would not have received nearly a fraction of the fanfare and acclaim that it did. There are too many plot holes, too many assumptions required, and believe it or not, very little actual tension and conflict.

Don’t get me wrong, I stayed engaged watching the story play out, even though I knew exactly what would happen next. The very fact that it was in fact, factual, was at the same time its greatest selling point and also its biggest handicap.

Yeah, go ahead and watch it, it’s not as bad as you might think, though it’s not as good as a little fictionalization could have made it.