Some characters seem to be amalgamations of multiple real-life individuals as well. Zero Dark Thirty. Zero Dark Thirty is the story of the hunt for bin Laden, as told from the viewpoint of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a woman in the CIA. Jessica is one of Mayas colleagues, and probably the only one you could plausibly describe as her friend. The narrative centers on the elusive al-Qaeda head, Osama bin Laden, in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. The production values are very low budget with almost no special affects, no technical CIA whiz-bang props, no James Bond gadgets or gizmos, just a few cell phones and lots and lots of talk. The C.I.A., and, in particular, Maya, are hard at work to uncover information regarding where bin Laden can be found, and are doing so on the assumption that, when hes found, the U.S. military will capture or kill him. It may be the fault of Andr Bazin, a great critic whose depth and brilliance were often clouded by doctrinaire fealty to the notion of ambiguity and the techniques (mainly deep focus and long takes) that he considered its aesthetic substrates. Running time: 157 minutes. Zero Dark Thirty's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is one of the finest available on Blu-ray.This is a track of incredible nuance, heavy bass, and precision elements alike, all played . Scheuer retired from her most recent role as deputy chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats late in 2021 and agreed to talk to Reuters this year. At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.'s . Lets begin! Zero Dark Thirty, which opens nationwide January 11th, is a white-knuckle look at the decade-long hunt for bin Laden, which virtually ignores party politics. Although they were suspicious, it was simply too good an opportunity to pass up, and they considered it worth the risk. | En Espaol Running time: 2 hour 37 min. Both are often at odds with their superiors. "The CIA is a lot different than Hollywood portrays it to be," reads an official explainer issued today by the Central Intelligence Agency a thinly veiled attempt to continue debunking Zero Dark Thirty, the controversial Oscar favorite that its director admittedly hates.Referring to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent, depictions of "shootouts and high speed chases," and scenes of "CIA . The former CIA agent also spoke about the incidence of torture in the form of waterboarding to extract information. Its the voice of the teacher or the analyst or the self-restraining parent whose blank false mask of benevolent authority and patient tolerance is actually filled with attitudinizing judgment and narrowly normative limits of acceptable, admissible feelings and actions. Zero Dark Thirty question. 1 at the box office. The spaces before your punctuation are bothersome. Actor Stephen Dillane by The heated topic of the ethics of torture has spilled over into the upcoming confirmation hearings for current White House anti-terrorism chief John Brennan, who has been nominated by President Obama to be the next CIA director. Slideshow 2066662 by yachi Told from the perspective of the CIA agents trying to track him down, the narrative takes a detailed look at the convoluted espionage process that went into finding the real-life terrorist. While the SEALs are unloading and categorizing the tapes, hard drives, and other intelligence materials that they seized from the compound, Maya is led to the body bag. For his bravery, Cairo earned a meeting with the President himself (described at length in the New Yorker) and was named Times Animal of the Year in 2011. When the lights came on and I discovered that I had been in my seat for two and a half hours, the movies length came as a surprise. As we learn, she was recruited out of high school to join the C.I.A. At one point Bissonnette describes how he asked Jen, Honestly, what are the odds its him? One hundred percent, she shot back, almost defiant, Bissonnette writes. so follow the slow leads is the game. She wasn't an ops officer (what most would commonly call a 'spy'), but she served more in what could be called a clerical position. After September 11th 2001, CIA rookie agent Maya is assigned to Pakistan to learn how to torture and seek out Osama Bin Laden. December 28, 2012. The movie is exciting to watchthe director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, organize the action to maximize suspense, subjecting Maya to a range of dangers and, at the point when she thinks that she has circumstantially located bin Laden, starting the equivalent of a ticking clock that stokes the thrills even more. If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. r/AskReddit is the place to ask and answer thought-provoking questions. It seems almost uncoincidental? Could Maya really have been recruited straight out of high school? Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the female targeter was one of the people from very early on pushing this courier approach. Its the first interview she has ever done, she said, and she decided to speak to make clear she was not forced out of the agency but left on her own terms. In fact, so accurate is the depiction of the events in the film that its makers had to be extra cautious during the casting process. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. This Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's Zero Dark Thirty appears poised to lose the Best Picture race to Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio's Argo, and as much as awards . Have always wondered why during the cafeteria scene in Zero Dark Thirty, Maya thinks she isn't allowed to disclose the reason she was recruited straight out of high school. Presumably if there was anyone she could discuss it with, it would be the Director. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, was with the SEALS during the compound raid, clad in special dog armor that can withstand clouds of hot shrapnel, and ready to sniff around for explosives or a secret hiding place for Bin Laden. Greg Miller is an investigative foreign correspondent based in London for The Washington Post and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. But in a broad sense, she said waterboarding cited in government reports was not torture, insisted such techniques can work and said any criticism of her was largely the result of her taking risks to combat terrorism. So declares the CIA Station Head in Pakistan about a new arrival in 2003, a "CIA targeter and subject-matter expert," Maya (Jessica Chastain). Recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1999 immediately following her high school graduation, Maya, who has been solely working on the Al Qaeda file, gets her first field assignment in 2003 in Pakistan as an analyst working with an interrogation team. Zero Dark Thirty, while on the surface about the 10-year search for bin Laden, is also really about the evolution of Chastain's Maya, as she transforms from a seeming naf at the start of the . In his book "No Easy Day", former SEAL Mark Bassionette, who was part of the mission which killed bin Laden, mentions a female CIA agent, who he refers to by the pseudonym "Jen", who worked with the SEAL team on the mission. After shes killed, a news report provides voiceover to the scene, mentioning that among the CIA employees killed in the attack was a mother of three. She believes a male operative would not have been described the same way. The latter was described as one of the CIAs top experts on al-Qaida and was killed in the Camp Chapman attack in 2009. I wondered about that too since I knew someone all of my childhood that worked for the CIA and they were definitely not recruited in high-school, but definitely were in college. Are the terrorist attacks depicted in the film real? Is she suggesting that the attempt to kill bin Laden is a crucial element in the effort to prevent such attacks? They do not recruit unless you are already in the military or intelligence community. Despite the filmmakers skill, the movie is nonetheless something of a litmus testhow a viewer reacts to the mission itself will likely be determined by how the viewer feels about bin Laden, the American military, and the so-called war on terror. Torture is depicted as indirectly but indubitably useful in the search for bin Laden (an assertion that has been denied by officials, as reported in the magazine by Dexter Filkins); a crucial piece of information in Mayas investigation is elicited from a prisoner who had been tortured and, now being fed a peaceful lunch, is threatened with more torture in the case of his non-coperation. What does Maya write (or draw?) Movie Review: "Zero Dark Thirty" By: Scott Pfeiffer Posted on: Monday, January 28, 2013 < < Back to It took a long time to get him. Meanwhile, Toby Young at The Telegraph states that Ammar is a composite of three Al Qaeda suspects, though how he arrived at this conclusion is unclear. I'm pretty sure they don't recruit at all. U.S. officials acknowledged that Boal met with Mayas real-life counterpart and other CIA officers, typically in the presence of someone from the agencys public affairs office. Written by Mark Boal, the film follows the decade-long international search for Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks. The story is a very good one but just too long. Now out of the CIA, Scheuers career has taken a turn: She is a life coach, running a business called YBeU Beauty, focusing on helping women look good, feel good, and do good. Zero Dark Thirty is the story of a heroine. Why were the CIA not more suspicious of the Jordanian doctor? Which company could go out of business tomorrow and it (Serious) What causes death more than people realize? During the scene where Maya is angry of at CIA that she found Osama Bin Laden and wrote its 52 days that she found the house, the BGM is from the telugu film Leader. Purpose of the making. The hidden premise of gun control is the states monopoly on force, the willing renunciation of the most potent form of self-defense in favor of collective defensenot the nave wishing-away of violent crime but the assumption of effective law enforcement that would both thwart and obviate the proliferation of firearms. Edit, She's a composite character-Maya is based on several female CIA officers who worked on the bin Laden case in the years before and after 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty operates on several levels, and it functions against itself: even as the movie stokes excitement for the hunt for bin Laden, it stands outside the mission andwithout actually posing questions about the operationposes the mission itself as a question, by way of canny and conspicuous omissions in content, strategies in representation, and control of tone. She told Reuters she joined Alec Station in 1999, after Michael Scheuer had left as chief. Theres no ideological context for bin Laden or those suspected of association with Al Qaeda; theres also no doctrinal, or, for that matter, personal context for the protagonist. Just like Maya, "Jen" considers the probability of bin Laden being in the house at 100% whilst others are more cautious, she observes the mission from the control room, is there to meet the SEALs when they return with bin Laden's corpse and bursts out crying afterwards.In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on American torture practices during the war on terror which referenced the influence of another CIA agent who was used as part of the composite character Maya. Jessica Chastain's character Maya, based on a real CIA operative involved in taking down Osama bin Laden, tells a fellow agent that she was recruited out of high . Both are professionally devoted to avenging the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11although Carrie seems more concerned with future attacks, while Maya is focused on getting Bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty's Maya is a singular force to be reckoned with and, as the film suggests, is something of a lone wolftwisting the arms of superiors to keep the hunt moving, baring her teeth at a conference table to get an operation approved, forever eating lunch alone since the death of her one . Screenwriter Mark Boal himself has acknowledged that all of the characters in the film are based on real people. Some of these real people, like the agent who inspired Maya, still work under secret identities, and Boal says that he and director Kathryn Bigelow went to great lengths not to blow their cover, including, e.g., not casting people who look like them. What the movie makes clear is that harsh physical abuse was a part of the CIAs post-9/11 investigations. The HUNT for Osama ~ from the INTEL side~ 4 STARS~ good movie, plot: THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADIN
The Hurt Locker functioned at two levelsit depicted a mission that targeted the perpetrators of monstrous deeds but that had a terrible effect on the soldiers who took part in it; it was both ambiguous and not. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. The screenplay was written by American journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal. Its revealed, near the end of the movie, that she was recruited for the C.I.A. Why did the SEAL team destroy the downed chopper? Edit, Awards She is a reluctant participant in extreme duress applied to the detainees, but believes that the truth may only be obtained through such tactics. I can't see them seriously recruiting high school kids because so much can change by the end of college. In real life, her identity and current position were carefully . who were pursuing bin Laden, even by means of rendition and torture? Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 war drama movie that follows the decade-long hunt for a terrorist leader and the high-stakes encounter through which he is apprehended. Edit. She unzips it, takes a long, hard look at the face, and confirms that it belongs to bin Laden. and has been religiously devoted to bin Laden ever since. Edit, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain), assigned to Pakistan to learn how to apply "enhanced interrogation" (i.e. Finally, in 2011, it appears that her work will pay off, and a U.S. Navy SEAL team is sent to kill or capture Bin Laden. Much of the events in the film, including its conclusion, are based on actual historical events, and though some of the characters have been fictionalized, Boal stated that all of them depict real people. I can't see them seriously recruiting high school kids because so much can change by the end of college. | A former CIA member who was branded the 'queen of torture' and was the inspiration for the movie Zero Dark Thirty is now an online beauty influencer - and is selling coaching sessions for $600. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. I didnt bury my head in the sand.. Why weren't the occupants of the house not more alarmed at the approach of the helicopters? Red Letter Media sells VHS copy of "Nukie" on eBay for Harry Melling talks about leaving Dudley Dursley behind Press J to jump to the feed. While critics and political pundits have been writing about the films depiction of torture for weeks, audiences may still emerge with a few questions about the films inspirations. The wig, everything, Kuwaiti drove a white S.U.V. User Ratings The raid itself is one long boring anti-climax, pretty much like the rest of this movie. Yes, 'Zero Dark Thirty' is based on a true story. They sought me out in kindergarten. The movies release was delayed amid criticism that it amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama. CIA operatives normally operate in a dark, shadowy world, but Scheuers experiences found the spotlight. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, IMDb's Most Anticipated New TV Series of 2023. THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADIN Overly hyped movie~ Jessica Chastain is solid as the youthful CIA INTELLIGENCE person "Maya" who recruited out of high school wants to "get ahead" in . What did she put on hold in her pursuit for bin Laden? The scene where the CIA agents in Pakistan are accosted by two armed men on motorbikes is based on a genuine incident, but in real life the CIA officer killed them both. By policy, the CIA doesnt discuss individual employees or confirm whether they worked at the agency. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The movie stays resolutely on the surface of events; Bigelow presents them as if their depiction sufficed for something more than a storynamely, for a moral questioning of the viewer, of the viewers judgment of the past decade of American politics in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In Zero Dark Thirty, she is named Maya and played by Jessica Chastain, who is earning plenty of plaudits for her performance. The only one you could plausibly describe as her friend CIA rookie Maya. In her pursuit for bin Laden torture in the film real after September 11th 2001, IMDb 's Anticipated. She is named Maya and played by Jessica Chastain, who is earning plenty of plaudits for her performance that... 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