![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Zero Dark Thirty
Jan. 19th, 2013 12:06 pmSaw this last night. I'll need to gather some more thoughts but highlights.
I was surprised at the strength of my emotional reaction to the handling of 9/11 and 7/7 - they were done well actually, but those events are still vivid in my mind, certainly 9/11 as it had such an impact on my life (*)
So, ZDT is an interesting film, powerful, disturbing and moving. A lot has been made of the torture scenes. I found them interesting, not because they showed that torture worked, but that it showed almost the opposite. The big gains were made later, through the stuff that I've heard British Intelligence officers say they learned the hard way 30 years ago. Tradecraft and Mind Games.
I was disappointed by Jennifer Chastain's performance though. While her character is very obviously an amalgam of many people, I felt she was somewhat flat, not carrying the obsessiveness well enough. I suspect part of that is that Clare Danes has defined the OCD nature of an obsessive intelligence analyst and in comparison to that Chastain didn't cut it for me.
Still, well worth watching, and for a long film the time flew.
I was surprised at the strength of my emotional reaction to the handling of 9/11 and 7/7 - they were done well actually, but those events are still vivid in my mind, certainly 9/11 as it had such an impact on my life (*)
So, ZDT is an interesting film, powerful, disturbing and moving. A lot has been made of the torture scenes. I found them interesting, not because they showed that torture worked, but that it showed almost the opposite. The big gains were made later, through the stuff that I've heard British Intelligence officers say they learned the hard way 30 years ago. Tradecraft and Mind Games.
I was disappointed by Jennifer Chastain's performance though. While her character is very obviously an amalgam of many people, I felt she was somewhat flat, not carrying the obsessiveness well enough. I suspect part of that is that Clare Danes has defined the OCD nature of an obsessive intelligence analyst and in comparison to that Chastain didn't cut it for me.
Still, well worth watching, and for a long film the time flew.
