As award season is here and the Oscars are coming up soon, most people are heading to the theatre based on hype and controversy. One film in particular has received more mixed reviews than praise.
Of course I had to see what everyone was complaining about from "Zero Dark Thirty." From everything I had heard, I assumed it was two and a half hours of nothing but torture.
For anyone who believes this, I can promise there is more to the movie than that. Rather than the 15 minutes that everyone is up in arms about, the movie focuses on the character Maya (portrayed by well-deserving Oscar nominee, Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative who spends over a decade searching for Osama Bin Laden. The film follows her search as she faces pitfalls from her enemies and her department.
Sadly, most people don't notice or care about the quality of the film compared to the controversy of several scenes depicting torture as a part of the process of the manhunt. The scenes themselves make up a small amount of the movie that runs almost three hours long, and during those scenes it shows the barbarism of torture not in any type of glorified light but in a way that would make any viewer feel uneasy.
While we can't control what did or didn't happen in real life, this film serves as an excellent platform to raise questions about the future of interrogation and torture. No matter where you stand on the issue or what you interpreted from the film, the important part is that the issue is being raised questions.
So many movies have the same stock heroes fighting evil in the same overdone stories, while "Zero Dark Thirty" tells an original story based off (not documenting) true events with realistic and flawed characters. Even if you don't agree with the choices made by the characters or by the director, there's something to consider and argue over other than how logical it was when the stereotypical hero crawled through a ventilation shaft (spoiler alert: it's not logical at all). Between big blockbuster hits and reality TV, it's easy to let the entertainment do the thinking for you.
While "Zero Dark Thirty" might not be for everyone, it challenges the audience and keeps a long drawn out story that everyone knows the ending to more interesting suspenseful than expected.
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