Having just watched Warfare, I wanted to watch some more (reasonably) contemporary stuff on similar lines. I wound up choosing Zero Dark Thirty, primarily for the Operation Neptune Spear part. Hence also my choice of banner image above.
Other demographics might choose other images to illustrate the film. For example, British Vogue magazine prefers the above. This is Jessica Chastain, as ‘Maya’, a fictional composite character, based in part on Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.
Bikowsky also figures large in the much better Looming Tower miniseries. Whilst working at Alec Station, for the CIA, she met the then head of said station, Michael Scheuer, and they eventually married.
Intriguingly, whilst it’s easy to find images of the married couple as dramatic characters, I couldn’t find any of them as a real life couple.
Zero Dark Thirty distorts history massively, and – in the way in which the Maya character is used – does so in a manner calculated to make those who froth at the mouth at the term ‘woke’ drool rabidly.
Both Zero Dark Thirty and The Looming Tower do real history a great disservice – as so many countless films do – by having overly good looking folk glamourise the tawdry doings of much frumpier more ordinary looking folk.
This creates a confusion, especially when films make claims – as Zero Dark Thirty does – to be based on real events. Ok, yes, it is based on real events. But it puts a very particular gloss on them. And many watching will very probably assume this is just how things really happened, when it isn’t.
Bikowsky, as she was then, wasn’t a lone ‘empowered female’ crusader, responsible for finding and killing Bin Laden. Not only was she not involved in much of the events as depicted here, but also many hold that she and Scheuer are culpable for 9/11 because they withheld vital intel from the FBI. This is a theme The Looming Tower addresses.
Presenting the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden as the work of one determined woman, in the face and teeth of many bumbling men, is pure fantasy.
For me, the best part of the film, by far, is the final Canaries segment, in which Navy SEAL Team Six (to use just one of this units many names!) attack the compound and kill Bin Laden. It’s very well done, and really rather horrible.
Speaking of horrible. This movie starts with quite a lot of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – or in plain English torture – being used on hapless ‘terror suspects’, at ‘dark sites’. Both the real US administration, and the makers of this film, have been widely criticised for suggesting such methods yield useful intel.
All in all, a rather muddled movie, that condenses and distorts an awful lot of history, and then presents it in a rather oddly skewed way. Certainly not brilliant. But still worth seeing.