Posted on 01/05/2013 8:02:08 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than two and a half hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
When I was head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession.
I must say, I agree with both the film critics who love “Zero Dark Thirty” as entertainment and the administration officials and prominent senators who hate the movie for the message it sends — although my reasons are entirely opposite theirs.
Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I haven’t seen it — AND WON’T -— but, did anyone really think they would get much right in this Obama inspired epic about the made for entertainment president?
I heard that in the movie...
1. They make every CIA person say the “F” word about 10,000 times
2. Every single male in the movie is extremely nasty and anti-woman
3. The heroine main-character is portrayed as single-handedly having got OBL
4. America is shown as being Very Bad
5. Torture, torture, torture, torture, torture
I was really looking forward to this movie, but I trust this critic (he is like us) and he says IT IS THE WORST MOVIE HE HAS EVER SEEN.
Did they cover the fact that we killed him 9 or 10 years ago?
(according to the media that is!), how many times do we have to kill this guy before he is dead?
Must be part cat.
Osama. Son of Elvis.
I agree that the CIA did not torture any Islamic agents. There were no finger nails pulled, limbs stretched, or any other unnatural movements forced upon them.
Making them compliant by making them uncomfortable is not torture.
Heard it was good and pretty non-political from one of
my friends. Saw Argo and liked that even with Lefty Aflek directing. Will see it when and out on DVD and judge for myself.
True. Anyone with any basic military training has experienced this.
From the first word in the title they got it wrong.
Nobody in the military - nobody - ever says “Zero” Dark Thirty.
It’s always “Oh-Dark-Thirty”.
Hollywood is populated by those who hate the military and have never served in it. They can’t even get the jargon right.
LOL! You’re right. It was always “Oh-Dark-Thirty”. Never heard Zero Dark Thirty until this movie came out.
It’s funny to watch people get their panties in a knot about how the movie has errors. It’s a ***Hollywood movie***, and not the documentary they pretend but cleverly never portray it as!
This is the same Hollywood that had Billy the Kid shoot “Murphy” in the head, at the end of “Young Guns”. In real life “Murphy” died of cancer later that year.
And “Doc Scurlock” portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland? In the movie he runs away with the young asian girl he stole from Murphy and dies in the stinking springs shoot out in Young Guns II. Of course, in real life, he died of old age in Texas in 1929. And was married to a spanish woman, two years before the Lincoln county war. He died in Young Guns II for one simple reason. Sutherland didnt want to be in the sequel and insisted that they kill off his character early in the script, even though that man died of old age.
So these whiners crying that Hollywood got it wrong crack me up. It’s almost unheard of that Hollywood is ever accurate about any historical event, or even close.
Getting history from Hollywood movies is very dicey business. The movie was nothing but a love letter to Obama from his Hollywood friends.
Your points 1 and 3 are correct, but the others are not. I enjoyed the movie, and really don’t understand all the liberal angst over it.
Something must have happened to force the WP to carry Rodriquez’s column because what he writes contradicts a lot of what Post writers, columnists and letters to the editor writers wrote about the pursuit of Bin Laden.
I don’t think that the WaPo suddenly developed a conscience or pro-America attitude. If they did, then they would have fired about half of their key writers, editorial writers, and columnists, as well as their Letters to the Editor editor.
Perhaps the Obama people made it known that they wanted the Obama regime to get the credit not only for “getting” Bin Laden”, but for “cleaning up” the intelligence community’s tactics. Nothing else makes any sense since the hunt for BL started under the first administration of George W. Bush, gained strength and direction during the second, and led to the elimination of Bin Laden by inertia in the Obama administration in its first term.
If the Obama people put pressure on the WaPo to publish things that would make O look good no matter what else was revealed, then I wouldn’t put it past them to do so. They have a lot of WP insiders who would also support such a tactic, a tactic of disinformation, misinformation, aggrandisement and back-patting (i.e. hogging all the glory and the credit while they can at the time before peoples’ memories of the truth began to fade).
At least Mr. Rodriguez has made an ernest attempt “to set the record straight”, something the Obamites will never do re the Massacre at Ben Ghazi, “Fast & Furious”, and John Kerry’s military records and contacts with the enemy during the Vietnam war.
Maybe the Wash Post got a conscience and wanted to tell the truth for once? Nah, pigs haven’t yet learned to fly though leftist/liberal crap does all the time in the mainstream media. That is why I always carry and umbrella in DC.
It’s like hearing a guy at the Walmart gun counter ask the clerk if they have any of those ‘double zero’ shotgun shells. It got real quiet.
I want to see it because it has the dems all wee wee’d up.. Even if it is propaganda, they seem to think it has enough truth to very vocally oppose it so that means it might hurt them.. the truth always does.
It’s on Kick-Ass Torrents, kat.ph. Just haven’t got around to watching it yet.
I think that's called marriage.
What does Zero Dark Thirty mean anyway?
Huh? It seems you didn't read the whole thing to the end.
Despite its flaws, inaccuracies and shortcuts, I do believe this film is well worth seeing. Like the real hunt for bin Laden, it goes on way too long, but there is value in the end. Theatergoers should understand, however, that “Zero Dark Thirty” is more than a movie and less than the literal truth. This is especially apparent in the final scene, with Maya in tears, drained, not sure where to go or what to do next.
Her real-world counterparts have no doubt: The battle against al-Qaeda is far from over.
Huh?
My use of “this critic” does not refer to the critic who wrote this article.
It’s another critic.
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