A winning team for a CIA narrative

Rating: 1/10 (24 January 2013)

Mrs. Bigelow is obsessed with obsession. Blue Steel, Point Break, the Hurt Locker, now Zero Dark Thirty. The background of the story changes, but the story remains the same. Behind different faces, the same obsessive character. The obsession portrayed in her films actually is quite simplistic and straightforward, but anyhow, in our time her "oeuvres" are considered as deep, realistic, and arty. After an adrenaline fix come the inevitable frustration and emptiness of living, Mrs. Bigelow shows it to us over and over again; her hero has a conniving streak in him/her, but a hero nevertheless. She's so focused on her obsessed character, it's easy for her to claim that the Iraq war film she made was apolitical, and ZDT, a political thriller, has no political agenda.
Mr. Boal is a journalist. When he begins to write stories for the big screen, we praise his "journalistic approach", and we can easily forget that, as most journalists these days in the US, Mr. Boal is an embedded journalist.
Unlike the Hurt Locker, which, by opening with a quote from Chris Hedges, gives a false impression of an antiwar movie, ZDT is at least honest. At the very beginning it gives us a warning:
"Based on first-hand accounts of actual events"
Aka what CIA told us and what CIA wants you to see.
The decade-long war on terror seen through a CIA agent's eyes, the whole film is shaped into a CIA narrative. As Mrs. Bigelow wrote in her LA Times article, defining ZDT's raison d'être:
"we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security."
How many times do you hear this from a CIA/Pentagon/WH spokesperson?
Yes never discount and never forget the victims of 9/11, we heard their voices; we saw the London bus bombing survivors bloody faced, eager to share their story. But we can well forget hundreds of thousands innocent civilians killed by US forces in the past ten years, not single one of them had a place in this film. We saw angry Pakistanis gathered in front of American embassy, jumping like savages. But we would not see those CIA drone strikes, bombing Pakistani wedding, killing women and children. "They hate us for our freedom!" we saw Mayor Bloomberg repeat Bush's line. Yes never forget the brave work of those professionals in the CIA, they worked their ass out torturing terrorists, what a psychological trauma it would be watching so many naked men every day? But we can certainly forget there was also innocent people got kidnapped, tortured by these brave professionals. Forget torture is a war crime, we got Ben Laden.
"Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement." Mrs. Bigelow defends her film in her LA Times piece. No Mrs. Bigelow, your film is not art. There's no art without truth.