True Stories 25: 10s—Zero Dark Thirty

After talking about Argo last week, a film that actually managed to make a hostage rescue both suspenseful and fun, we look this week at a military mission that is devoid of fun, that’s for sure: Zero Dark Thirty.[2012] by Mark Boal. It’s a gripping film that looks at the multi-year attempts to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

Take a look at the trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJFra3B9sbA

One of the difficulties for this story was to condense about 10 years of material into a two-and-a-half-hour film. And when you’re dealing with historically verified material, that’s hard to do. But most experts applaud the film for managing to get almost everything right.

The CIA reviewed the script to be assured that nothing violated national security and they removed a couple of scenes. One of them they took out was dogs being present during the torture scenes. And therein lies the controversy with this script: the torture scenes.

No one disputes that the torture in the scenes was depicted accurately, but the criticism from some ranks was that by portraying that torture in all its severity, the film was endorsing that torture. And yes, this was [and for some no doubt still is] a big point of controversy.

So ask yourself—if you were the writer of this film and you’d portrayed events exactly as you understood them, would you change a scene so that people wouldn’t think you were endorsing torture?

For me, the job of a screenwriter is to be as accurate about true events as possible. And if the torture happened as depicted, that’s just truth—it’s not endorsement of that torture. Sure, you can have a character or two be seen to be aghast at such horrible methods to show that you do not support such torture—but did that happen? Was there a character that stood up during the torture and said, “Are we sure we should do this? ” Or course not. And if there wasn’t such a protest from someone who was there, do you have the right to include it in the film?

This is tough stuff, isn’t it? What exactly is your job as the writer? Are you supposed to be on the politically correct side of everything? If so, does that mean you lack the courage to tell things as they are?

One of the things I liked about Zero Dark Thirty is that it told things as they were—it didn’t sugar-coat anything. It didn’t try to create drama and suspense, it operated more like a thriller that made you wonder how they did this. After all, we all knew how it came out, but the minute-to-minute events let us see what happened, let us share in the climax that we all knew was coming.

So from a film about bringing down bin Laden this week, to next week’s film about bringing down Jordan Belfort.

Who?

Well, you probably know him better as The Wolf of Wall Street.

Copyright © Diane Lake

27Nov22

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