Zero Dark Thirty (Alternate Review)

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a black screen and some audio from 911 calls made from the Twin Towers on 9/11. This is cinema verité, as the film uses real footage to punctuate its dramatisation of the hunt to find and kill Osama bin Laden for crimes against humanity – or really, against America.

This is not a polemical film. Quite the opposite – through the torture, the explosions, the gunfire, Kathryn Bigelow’s direction provides a dispassionate view. For some people, this hasn’t been enough – if a movie is going to depict torture, they seem to think it has to be unequivocal in denouncing it. Zero Dark Thirty isn’t trying to raise a political agenda, however – it’s about trying to tell the story of what happened.

Unlike My Esteemed Colleague, the movie I thought of while watching it was Argo. Both attempt straightforward accounts of US secret operations, one a hidden rescue mission from a brief period of time over thirty years ago, one a fairly public manhunt that spanned the decade of most recent memory. But both are attempting an authenticity, attempting some simple recreations of real events, without overly garnishing the narrative.

However, while Argo eventually succumbs to some Hollywood mythmaking, Zero Dark Thirty ends completely differently. After its somewhat low-key beginnings, the movie shows the invasion of the infamous compound in Abbottabad and refuses to glorify it. The music – already only sparingly used in the film – goes silent, the screen spends a lot of time in night vision, and in painstaking, matter-of-fact detail, we get to accompany the marines.

Zero Dark Thirty is a terrific film. The cast is excellent, though it can be a bit distracting as each new, recognisable face appears, as even many minor characters were familiar. It’s not a film about surprises (especially if you remember your dates), though you are guaranteed to jump at least once and foreknowledge definitely increases the tension at other points. But above all, it seems it wants to present a series of events and let the audience make their mind up about them, as it defiantly doesn’t sign-post how you should be reacting.

Intense, disquieting, intelligent. Definitely worth seeing.

Zero Dark Thirty

Here is the world as it ends: alone, stunned, and with the never-ceasing echoes of alarms. Not with a bang, but many.

Zero Dark Thirty is incredible for what it tries to achieve. Alongside The Social Network, it is one of few attempts in recent film to chronicle the state of the world as we have it now, in front of us.

As a procedural, it works well. The film covers many years and breaks them into loosely shaped episodes, feeling more like a filmed non-fiction piece than a piece of cinema. Certain moments do lend towards the cinematic and the big-noting of character moments – particularly a central episode, ‘The Meeting’ – but these occasional leanings towards tradition and type in film are grounded within the horrific terrain of the subject material.

This is a film that begins with terror and, on the outside at least, tries to document a search for peace after one act of terror.

The opening sequence, though much talked about for its depictions of torture, is actually the easiest to manage, and it’s hard to see how some critics can maintain this shows a sanctioning of torture as a valid method of interrogation. To do so would reduce the film to simple cause-and-effect, whereby it begins with torture used to discover the links to Bin Laden’s whereabouts, and by the film’s ending he has been found and killed. The film, and life, is not that simple.

From the torture scenes onwards, the film documents a descent into hell, not a rising out of it. The truth, and certainty in it, becomes harder and harder to identify and process, and the audience is forced to question the cost of everything. The cost of lives, of humanity, to spend a decade in search of one man and make him to atone for his crimes. It begs us to question whether this is the legacy that we want to leave history to document.

As such, Zero Dark Thirty is unusual in its structure and approach to a difficult subject. Unusually, it comes to resemble The Silence of the Lambs, with its female detective navigating her way through a seemingly impenetrable chaos of leads and dead-ends. Terror and horror in both films are the same: unique, graphic and unintelligible. The compound in Abbottabad that secured Bin Laden is akin to Buffalo Bill’s basement of horrors – right down to the extensive night-vision and claustrophobia – as our protagonists descend further and further into hell to root out evil once and for all. Tellingly, the difference between the two films is that one can only feel as if the protagonists in Zero Dark Thirty brought hell with them when they landed in that compound, and have subsequently made the world that way. There is no salvation, no atonement for sins, just the fear, the paranoia of more terror on the horizon.

This film is the constant wailing of alarms in the distance that we have to live with, whether they’re real or just rattling around as echoes in our heads.

in defence of Superman Returns

Okay, so you’ve worked out what this is about. To date, I count myself as the only person I know who really liked this film.

And it’s strange, because it was well received at the time, made lots of money, and certainly continued the trend of displaying Bryan Singer as a director who could treat comic book characters with respect and seriousness, whilst maintaining a lightness of touch and affection for the source material. And this was well before every comic book film decided they were going to do the whole Nolan thing, as if that’s the only measure of how to do this stuff for a contemporary audience.

But, back to the film. I was new to Superman, not a huge fan of the originals. I found the character somewhat bland, a bit pointless – what can you do with someone all powerful anyway? It’s just not dynamic for a narrative.

And yet I found myself captivated by this. Singer had managed to not only reboot (can we find a new word for reboot, please?) the character for the fans, but make the story and the mythology relevant for a modern audience and – more importantly – a modern audience post September 11.

This is key to me. Singer goes to pains to show how the character fits into the modern world. The mention of kids with phones getting better pictures than the media is only part of this. Superman himself references how America had become so sure of itself, so wrapped up in its specialness, that it didn’t need him anymore. And away he went. Tragedy strikes, and now all call for a saviour. All call for a quick fix to cure the world of all its ills. Singer echoes a Christian mythology here – the capture and brutalising of Superman by Luthor’s henchmen is eerily similar to a scouring and crucifixion. Here is America destroying its emblem, terrorising it even, and ultimately the only way back for the good guys in Singer’s film is by their own efforts and ingenuity, not the reliance on a superhero.

This type of story worked, and resonated for the audiences, yet strangely nobody was granted the right to a sequel. It wasn’t action-packed enough, apparently, not dark enough for the Batman Begins crowd, not silly enough for the Spiderman brigade, and certainly not near the violence of a 300 or Sin City-type audience. But it was the perfect film for this character, the perfect way to treat it. The score is wonderful, especially in big moments like the plane crash, and the visual style is just wonderful. It feels exactly as it should, visually, a golden age now gone bad, and the characters are framed large in a way that highlights them as archetypes for our own ideologies. The sequences of Superman’s childhood – where he discovers and explores his powers – are a joy, and handled all with pure cinematic style; dialogue-free and full of implication.

Lastly, it gives a reason for Superman as a character. A relevance. This isn’t a story about him teaching us how to look after ourselves – though that does happen – it gives him a reason to be here in the first place. And that isn’t mythological, or superheroic, or powerful. It’s to discover his humanity as a father.

And Brando’s voiceover kills me.

Silver Linings Playbook

Yes, that’s a blurry Julia Stiles in the background.

Silver Linings Playbook features more football, dancing and talk of gambling than I expected. It also features less in the way of an in-depth approach to mental illness – certainly less than suggested by the beginning – but is still an open, charming romantic comedy.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) is getting out of an institution at the beginning of the film, to go back and live with his parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert de Niro). His goal is to reconcile with his wife, but along the way he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a recent widow and fellow sufferer of mental illness, who both helps and hinders his progress. Being a David O. Russell movie, the film is generous with all its actors, big parts and small, but the two leads shine the most. All the performances work (though Jacki Weaver’s Australian accent comes through occasionally), but it’s a pleasure to just watch Cooper and Lawrence bounce off each other.

So I enjoyed the film a lot. Maybe not ‘tons of Oscars’ enjoyed, but still. However, I also very much see criticism about the film’s treatment of mental illness. We are told right from the beginning that Pat is bi-polar, and to begin with the film does a good job of showing the difficulties that brings with it. There’s an especially nice moment from when Pat and Tiffany first meet when they discuss different medications they’ve been on, and how they made them feel, a conversation I’m very familiar with. But after the first forty-five minutes or so, they progress from ‘actual’ crazy to ‘movie’ crazy, which is a lot funnier and more cinematic but also a very common cop-out when dealing with such things. So often, mental illness in movies is played as a quirk, and while Silver Linings Playbook doesn’t quite cross that line, it gets much closer to it than it seems like it’s going to from the beginning.

It’s not a bad thing that the film is really just a well-made romantic comedy, but it seems like it could be more than that, one that might manage to take a less romanticised view of what people with mental illness go through, or that love can’t conquer all. As I said, I was charmed, and not offended, and definitely enjoyed it. But instead of staying on the track of being about the intersection of love and craziness, it became about American football. And dancing. And gambling. Which made me a little wistful for what it almost was.