Zero Dark Thirty

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Movie
German title Zero Dark Thirty
Original title Zero Dark Thirty
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2012
length 157 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Kathryn Bigelow
script Mark Boal
production Kathryn Bigelow,
Mark Boal,
Matthew Budman,
Megan Ellison ,
Jonathan Leven
music Alexandre Desplat
camera Greig Fraser
cut William Goldenberg ,
Dylan Tichenor
occupation

Zero Dark Thirty is an American action - thriller from the year 2012 . The film shows the United States' search for Osama bin Laden and his subsequent killing in Operation Neptune's Spear . The mission began at 12:30 a.m. The film title takes up the expression "Zero Dark Thirty", which is common in the US military and marks this point in time. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow based on a script by Mark Boal ; Jessica Chastain played the leading role .

The film was released in US cinemas on December 19, 2012 and ran in Germany on January 31, 2013. It received consistently very positive reviews with a meta-judgment (average rating ) of 92% (determined by Rotten Tomatoes ).

Bigelow and Boal have repeatedly emphasized that Zero Dark Thirty is a feature film, not a documentary. Nevertheless, the film is based on actual events and in particular the main Maya character is a real person, although some details have been changed to protect their identity.

action

The film begins with a black screen and original recordings of victims in by al-Qaida perpetrated -Terroristen terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 came alongside nearly 3,000 other people were killed. As a result, the CIA is increasingly looking for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden . In 2003, CIA analyst Maya was transferred to Pakistan , where she and CIA agent Dan were looking for clues about bin Laden's whereabouts. Maya accompanies Dan to a secret CIA prison (so-called Black Site ), where the CIA agent tortures the prisoner Ammar using waterboarding and other measures in order to learn more about the so-called Saudi group (the 19 assassins in the USA) , to which Ammar belongs. Maya was initially repelled by the prisoner's torture and humiliation, but shortly afterwards she took part herself. Ammar, who sent money to the Saudi group, confesses after the torture broke his will. He points out the messenger Abu Ahmed to the CIA agents .

Two years later, the terrorist attacks on July 7, 2005 in London rock the United Kingdom. At the same time, Maya and Dan can use a ruse to get information from the prisoner Ammar. With the help of the Pakistani police, the CIA can then arrest the alleged al-Qaeda member Abu Faraj . Maya interrogates him and has him tortured after Abu Faraj denies knowing any Abu Ahmed (Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti). Maya believes that if they find Abu Ahmed they can locate bin Laden.

Your colleague Dan will eventually be transported back to the United States. Dan warns Maya that times will change. She shouldn't be the last to be found in prison with "a dog collar in hand" (one of the ways Dan had tortured Ammar by walking him naked on a dog leash). Maya and her colleague Jessica watch an interview with the new President Barack Obama on television in which the latter announces that the United States “does not torture”.

Over the next five years, she looks for clues about Abu Ahmed's whereabouts. She befriends her colleague Jessica and they both survive the bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008. On December 30, 2009, Jessica dies in the attack at Camp Chapman .

According to a Jordanian prisoner, Abu Ahmed was killed in 2001. Maya's superiors fear that they have been looking for the wrong man for over nine years. Meanwhile, Maya receives clues from a colleague who is evaluating files from the Moroccan secret service that Abu Ahmed is identical to Ibrahim Sayeed. She assumes that the only known shot of Abu Ahmed actually shows Ibrahim Sayeed's brother Habib, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2001. She asks Dan to help her.

Dan uses CIA funds to bribe a Kuwaiti “businessman” with a Lamborghini to get Sayeed's mother's phone number. This allows the CIA to trace all calls on their phone. A caller always calls very briefly from different locations, which makes identification difficult. Maya, who barely survived a direct attack aimed at her by several terrorists armed with machine guns, suspects that the caller is Abu Ahmed. She convinces her superiors to intensify the search for Abu Ahmed again. Ultimately, the attempts are crowned with success. The agents shadow Abu Ahmed and follow him to a heavily secured building in Abbottabad .

The outside of the building is subjected to an intensive examination, but the presence of bin Laden is not considered certain. Nevertheless, there are many indications that the al-Qaida boss is hiding. During a meeting, the CIA director is confirmed by high-ranking CIA agents that they suspect bin Laden to be in the building complex with a 60 to 80 percent probability. Maya, on the other hand, assures him that she is 100% sure that Bin Laden is there. From members of the JSOC she learns of the loss of several elite soldiers in an earlier storming of an alleged hiding place in bin Laden.

Finally, the storming of the property is approved and takes place on May 2, 2011, thirty minutes after midnight ("Zero Dark Thirty"). An elite unit is flown in in two helicopters without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. The helicopters, which have not yet been tested in practice, are largely protected against radar location and equipped in such a way that they cause as little noise as possible. Although one of the two helicopters crash land due to technical problems, the Navy SEALs storm the building and kill Bin Laden along with several others. The frightened relatives and women are handcuffed in a room and detained until the Pakistani security forces arrive. The soldiers are still trying to take as many hard drives and documents as possible with them, but have to abort this soon as Pakistani forces are approaching the object. The body is taken to Jalalabad , Afghanistan , where Maya identifies it. Shortly thereafter, she was flown out as the only passenger on board a large military transporter. The pilot's question as to where “should it go now” remains unanswered. As the plane takes off, Maya, who has only hunted bin Laden during her CIA career, is overwhelmed by her feelings and cries.

occupation

CIA
Navy
Other

Controversy

Campaign aid for Obama

Even before filming began, a political debate began about whether a film released so shortly before the 2012 presidential election was intended to "campaign aid" for Obama . The Republican Party feared the filmmakers were trying to remind voters of one of Obama's greatest triumphs. The film distributor denied that political considerations had played any role in dating the release date.

After a long discussion, the distributor postponed the start of the film to January 2013, with a limited release after the election at the end of December 2012.

Access to intelligence information

Various sources have speculated as to whether the Obama administration granted Bigelow and Boal access to highly confidential intelligence information in the course of their research for the film. Bigelow immediately denied the allegations and Jay Carney , the White House press secretary, called the allegations "ridiculous".

In August 2012, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch released documents from the CIA and the Department of Defense, which they had requested from the authorities under the guidelines of the Freedom of Information Act . However, no evidence was found in the documents that intelligence information had been passed on to the filmmakers.

Representation of torture

In response to the critical discussion about the representation of the waterboarding scenes, Bigelow replied that the torture was part of the story and therefore cannot be left out. In an open letter in the Los Angeles Times on January 15, 2013, Bigelow reiterated her assessment that the freedom of art must not be restricted:

“Those of us who are artistic know that representation does not mean approval. If it were, no artist could paint inhuman practices, no writer could write about them, and no filmmaker could deal with the sensitive issues of our time. "

- Kathryn Bigelow

The philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek responded in a guest article for the Guardian that Bigelow without any doubt advocates the "normalization of torture":

“You don't have to be a moralist or naively view the urgency of the fight against terror to see that torture is such a profound shock that its neutral representation - that is, neutralizing this harrowing dimension - is already a kind of Represents approval. "

- Slavoj Žižek

After the film was released, three US senators also demanded clarification from the producers that the information that led to the discovery of bin Laden was not obtained through the torture of al-Qaeda members. This representation in the film is fictional. Bigelow also commented on this in her letter to the Los Angeles Times:

“I believe Osama bin Laden was found through astute detective work. However, as we all know, torture was used in the early years of the hunt. That's not to say that she was the key to finding bin Laden. They say she was part of history that we couldn't ignore. "

- Kathryn Bigelow

Unauthorized use of footage of victims of terrorism

Relatives of Betty Ong, a flight attendant whose plane was hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001, alleged that Ong's voice recording was used in the film without permission. The family requested an apology from the filmmakers and a donation to a charity, emphasizing that the Ong family oppose torture. Mary and Frank Fetchet, the parents of Brad Fetchet, who had been on the phone from the World Trade Center, criticized the filmmakers for using their son's voice without permission.

Reviews

The meta service Rotten Tomatoes has an excellent average rating of 92% from 265 evaluated reviews.

David Kleingers called the film a "masterpiece" on Spiegel Online and judged:

“Action with a claim: With her thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow presents a masterpiece. Zero Dark Thirty captivates and disturbs at the same time - also thanks to the leading actress Jessica Chastain, who kidnaps us into the paranoid world of a CIA agent. "

- David Kleingers

The film critic Michael Föls called the film "highly ambitious and cinematically impressive" and, in addition to the performance of the actors, particularly praised the filmmaker's neutral position:

“Zero Dark Thirty shows us what is really behind the obscure term counter-terrorism. Kathryn Bigelow and author Mark Boal fray the hunt for Osama bin Laden into a multitude of morally highly ambivalent sub-processes and show what a dirty job it is to try to protect the security of nations. At the same time, the film indirectly questions the usefulness of the operation and, precisely because of its neutral position, raises an incredible number of questions. "

- Michael Föls

Michael Kienzl from critic.de, however, emphasized that Bigelow surprisingly dispensed with "psychological deep drilling" in the figure drawing:

“With a film that, given its size, works surprisingly little through the emotions of its characters, it almost goes without saying that moments with melodramatic potential, such as the loss of several colleagues, remain just footnotes in the narrative. You can see for yourself that Bigelow is also a great action director in a carefully staged chase through the rush hour traffic of a Pakistani city or the night storm on bin Laden's hiding place. "

- Michael Kienzl

Thomas Groh interpreted the film at Perlentaucher as an "image-political intervention":

"If such a political statement can be inferred from the film at all, it is most likely a positioning that is at a distance from the official iconography and the power interests attached to it."

- Thomas Groh

Gregor Wossilus from the film magazine Kino Kino praised the film as "absolutely worth seeing, explosive, important cinema":

“The strength of the film lies in the openness, in the ruthlessness of Bigelow's pictures and the sobriety of their staging: That relentless 'Look!' eats itself into the memory. With Bigelow there is no glorification of the US struggle: the torture, the violence, the aggression in action to defend one's own life and ultimately to capture bin Laden, it destroys persecutors and the persecuted. Not all parts of the year-long manhunt are equally exciting, and if you don't pay attention, you risk losing the thread in the complex story. "

- Gregor Wossilus

Ulrich Kriest praised the film in the film service as "worth seeing" and judged:

"The film is a fast-paced, extremely exciting, almost documentary, but above all extremely uncomfortable political thriller full of unpleasant truths and political ambivalences, the assessment and weighting of which is ultimately up to the individual viewer and his political stance."

- Ulrich Kriest

Awards

The drama was nominated for an Oscar in five categories : Best Film , Best Actress , Best Original Screenplay , Best Sound Editing and Best Editing , of which it ultimately won together with the feature film Skyfall in the Best Sound Editing category . In addition, the film was nominated for numerous other prizes and some were awarded. This includes:

In 2016, Zero Dark Thirty ranked 57th in a BBC survey of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Zero Dark Thirty . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2013 (PDF; test number: 136 476 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Zero Dark Thirty . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ a b Bin Laden Film's Focus Is Facts, Not Flash . Guardian. Retrieved June 7, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b Bin Laden Film's Focus Is Facts, Not Flash . In: The New York Times , November 23, 2012. 
  5. ↑ Obama not in 'Zero Dark Thirty' thriller about hunt for Osama bin Laden in Entertainment Weekly from August 6, 2012.
  6. ↑ Bin Laden Movie Gets Pushed Back in IGN Entertainment from October 20, 2011.
  7. ↑ Kathryn Bigelow denies White House favoritism over Bin Laden film . In: The Guardian , August 11, 2011. 
  8. ↑ Government communicated with "Zero Dark Thirty" makers  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Chicago Tribune on August 29, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.chicagotribune.com  
  9. ^ Zero Dark Thirty's torture problem is ours as much as the film-makers' . Guardian. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  10. ^ Zero Dark Thirty is not pro-torture, say film-makers . Guardian. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  11. ↑ Kathryn Bigelow addresses 'Zero Dark Thirty' torture criticism . Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  12. ↑ Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood's gift to American power . The Guardian. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  13. ↑ Tagesschau, December 20, 2012: "Zero Dark Thirty" has started: US senators criticize Osama bin Laden film ( Memento from December 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Kathryn Bigelow addresses 'Zero Dark Thirty' torture criticism . Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 5, 2017.
  15. ↑ Michael Cieply: 9-11 victim's family raises objection to Zero Dark Thirty , New York Times . February 23, 2013. Archived from the original on February 24, 2013. “The Ong family is also asking that the filmmakers donate to a charitable foundation that was set up in Ms. Ong's name. Further, they want Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is distributing “Zero Dark Thirty” in the United States, to include a credit for Ms. Ong and a statement on both its Web site and on home entertainment versions of the film making clear that the Ong family does not endorse torture, which is depicted in the film, an account of the search for Osama bin Laden. " 
  16. ↑ 9/11 families upset over "Zero Dark Thirty" recordings . In: CBS News . February 25, 2013. Retrieved February 28, 2013.
  17. ↑ Zero Dark Thirty . Rotten tomatoes. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  18. ↑ In the head of the bin Laden hunter . spiegel.de. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  19. ↑ Zero Dark Thirty . filmering.at. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  20. ↑ Zero Dark Thirty . critic.de. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
  21. ↑ Silhouette games . Pearl divers. Retrieved January 30, 2013.
  22. ↑ Zero Dark Thirty - Film Review . cinema cinema. Archived from the original on February 3, 2013. Retrieved January 31, 2013.
  23. ↑ Ulrich Kriest: Zero Dark Thirty , in: Film-Dienst No. 3/2013, p. 28 f.