04 Jan “Zero Dark Thirty” – film review

I wrote this post half-lit on half a bottle of gin. Not my proudest moment, and i have toyed periodically with pulling it down, but i recently was hit with DDoS attacks and several threatening emails and (supposedly) phone calls for being “un-American.” Apparently this film review was offensive to an entire nation. So i’m leaving it up.

I don’t do film reviews. I don’t do music reviews or top music lists, or whatever. But hot-dang if i’m not going to review this piece of propagandist American drivel of a film that left my toes and hair curled…

Rotten Tomatoes found that 93% of professional reviewers liked it. So far it has a 7.0 on IMDB. Hrm. And hrm to any reviewer who thinks this film is worth watching or even giving a thumbs up to. You are brainwashed.

Why?

Let’s start with the women in the movie. Let’s skip the U.S. women for now – i can’t go there without sounding catty and distracted. Every. Single. Muslim. Woman. In the film (what few there were) was not just in hijab or al-amira, or shayla (well, except in the rare scene where the American protagonist woman wore one), rather, they were in niqab, chadris, or burqa – full coverage. There was not a single woman of Pakistani or Saudi descent who was not so fully covered as to not be seen. Oh – except the “loose women” of the Kuwait City club scene. By the way, the Kuwaiti intelligence was bought with a night of hot girls, alcohol, and, what can only be presumed to be drugs… but i’ll leave my speculation to the side for now.

Women do not exist except as victims and shrouded figures of no consequence – even in their own homes. Never mind that the main protagonist is a woman – “She’s a killer,” one military person calls her. She proves to be an asexual being with a single-minded focus on a single courier for UBL. She is “tough” and “hard nailed”, but cries easily. The writers felt compelled to write  a scene where she insists she doesn’t sleep with anyone. “I’m not that girl that fucks. It’s unbecoming.” “So,” her friend says, “a little foolin’ around wouldn’t hurt you… So no boyfriend.” Okay, we get it – she’s so manly she out mans men. She’s so focused on her work that she doesn’t even think about sex. Hard nosed, focus-driven women don’t think about sex. They don’t have time. She’s pretty, but not too pretty. She’s intelligent and hard-bitten. She’s going to get her man. She borders on man-hating. It’s worth noting that for as much as they play her as The Only Woman Among Men, the team that hunted UBM was made primarily of women…

And yet it’s a woman who messes up so badly that six American are killed and seven wounded on a military base in Pakistan. She’s a “mother of three” – just feminized enough to be womanly – but we have no idea she has children until over an hour into the film – after she’s been killed. Not when she meets the main protagonist. Not when the bar they are having a drink in is bombed. Not when she is at work… no – after she is dead – she becomes a mother. Of three. The sad music two minutes before the bomb exploding gives away the moment. Badly planned, badly executed, badly filmed. It’s a piece of over-wrought drivel that actually extends for several minutes… a build up of non-characters – a possible future-doctor of UBL, he needs dialysis, blah-blah-blah. No one is buying it – except a few CIA operatives desperate to catch UBL, the catch of their careers, in a ridiculous film.

But the real problem? The real problem is that the “detainee program” (read: extraordinary rendition and torture programs) have been discontinued because of those pesky senators and representatives who are in the way. Yes, that‘s the problem. We soooo would have had UBL years sooner had the US been able to continue to torture indiscriminately. Those pesky lawyers would just “warn Osama” – those damn pesky lawyers. Amazing. Had all the civilians simply left easy enough alone, the movie seems to say, UBL would have been captured so much sooner… if only the pesky civilian population had understood and believed in the infallibility of the military intelligence and CIA, then we could have saved years and years.

“You know we lost the ability to prove that [he’s Bin Laden] when we lost the detainee program. Who the hell am i supposed to ask? Huh? Some guy in Gitmo who’s all lawyered up? He’ll just tell his lawyer to warn Bin Ladin!”

“You’ll think of something.”

Apparently the torture scene at the beginning of the film was for us soft liberals. Yeah, it seemed to say, it was terrible… but we used it to our advantage and managed to save lives! We were creative. We thought of stuff.

And think of something they did.

I started looking for yoga classes in town around this point. I’d already irritated Jason with my diatribe about the fact that CIA and military intelligence women can’t afford (and actually can’t get) such expensively highlighted hair as the American women that were occasionally thrown into the film. (Sorry, ladies of the service, but it’s true – when was the last time you had a Hollywood highlight service – in Pakistan, no less?) My tolerance for Hollywood-manufactured “America-fuck-yeah” bull propaganda is extremely low.

When i returned to the film, half lit with gin and tonics, all i saw were more faceless, nameless Pakistani women in burqas. All being harassed by white men with night vision goggles and abs. Seriously. Even Chris Pratt militaried up for his role in this film, out of his usual doltish town-idiot role in Parks and Recreation and other films. It was beyond disgusting.

My tolerance for this kind of bullshit patriotic, pseudo-feminist, anti-brown-person, militarised hero-worship drivel is beyond comprehension. And frankly, anyone who is stupid enough to find this at all as amusing, entertaining, or inspiring are brainless.

Oh, and by the way, i totally and completely stole the photo. I simply don’t have anything offensive enough to peg with the post.