![]() It’s a measure of the seriousness of her intentions that this opening gambit doesn’t feel instantly exploitative. ![]() She opens with a stark black screen and audio of real-life voicemails left by 9/11 victims just moments before the World Trade Center collapsed. But you don’t tell this story – of the CIA’s decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden – without including torture, and pussyfooting around that would have only roused the ire of a different set of critics.īigelow is not a kid-glove kind of filmmaker. But dramatization of a thing is not the same as an endorsement of it, and Bigelow and Boal make it plain that the intelligence extracted via torture was compromised at best and, frequently, flat wrong. Some critics have wagged that Zero Dark Thirty is pro-torture, while other government officials have complained that the film oversells the efficacy of the enhanced interrogation techniques that for many came to define the Bush era. ![]() As a cinematic experience, Zero Dark Thirty can be downright punishing – a word not chosen lightly, given that U.S.-sanctioned torture figures prominently here and has been courting controversy since even before the film’s release. Much as they did in their 2008 collaboration The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and two-time screenwriter Mark Boal eye the line where suspense resides and push straight through to stress, to agitation.
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