Finally got around to seeing Bigelow’s film about the search for and subsequent discovery and killing of Bin Laden. Undoubtedly a fine piece of film making but not without its issues. Whilst it has received many critical plaudits, it has also attracted a certain amount of controversy and criticism.
The most serious of which is that it endorsed the use of torture techniques (particularly water boarding) to extract information. Perhaps the most telling criticism was from John McCain, himself a torture victim, who claimed its most serious flaw was in appearing to show that torture was effective (by eliciting information that was pertinent to the discovery of Bin Laden’s bolt hole). Equally, however, there have been those who have argued that the explicit depiction of torture in the interrogation scenes is an extremely powerful exposure of such techniques. I suspect that reaction to this aspect of the film is most probably governed by the preconceptions and beliefs that you take into the cinema with you. For my part, because the film making gave us an “on the ground as it happened” kind of feel, it also gave it a moral ambiguity lacking any ethical core.
And just as importantly, when will current film makers finally recognise that the vacuous stare into space that so many actors seem to employ as a mechanism to convey meaning does nothing of the sort – acting would be a better option. Overall, good but no banana….