I haven’t seen Zero Dark Thirty and I don’t plan to do so. I’ve read enough about the film’s glorification of torture and violence, and the falsifications of history, that I’m not interested. I did read Matt Taibbi’s review, however, which is primarily a comment on what this film says about us:
The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn’t who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we’ve become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it. That’s pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie so good it’ll be seen everywhere in the world – and all it does is prove him right about us.
I saw it on opening night. I thought it was good and worth recommending to anyone who would be interested in an education to what really goes into doing something like finding UBL. Although some details were surely left out and characters omitted/combined, the spirit was that of realism. There was no “sexing-up” of anything, including torture. It certainly didn’t “glorify it” and I think Taibbi’s assertion that it did is due to his seeing it though his own biased lenses (not that being biased against torture is a bad thing but can make one claim “glorification” when a moviemaker doesn’t go out of the way to reverse propagandize it)