Bigelow and Boal's second collaboration, Zero Dark Thirty, spans a whole decade, from 9/11 to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and it centres on a CIA operative called Maya (Jessica . In the film, Maya watches an al-Qaida suspect get waterboarded and locked in a tiny compartment. Maya is widely assumed to be based on a real CIA agent referred to as Jen in No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden. Others are public figures or agents whose true identities have already been revealed, but the film still declines to refer to these characters by their full real names. Jessica is one of Mayas colleagues, and probably the only one you could plausibly describe as her friend. Theres no ideological context for bin Laden or those suspected of association with Al Qaeda; theres also no doctrinal, or, for that matter, personal context for the protagonist. Is she suggesting that the attempt to kill bin Laden is a crucial element in the effort to prevent such attacks? Slideshow 2066662 by yachi So declares the CIA Station Head in Pakistan about a new arrival in 2003, a "CIA targeter and subject-matter expert," Maya (Jessica Chastain). It's not the how in the question it is the "why". Zero Dark Thirty was released just 19 months after the raid in Pakistan: It waded knowingly into a fraught slice of history just as that history was taking shape, and played a role, however hard . Most notably, the central character Maya (Jessica Chastain) is inspired by a real-life CIA operative but is also a composite of multiple women who helped track down Bin Laden. If I had a watch, I wouldnt have looked at it once during the screening of Zero Dark Thirty that I attended several weeks ago. Though Zero Dark Thirty refers to Maya being recruited to the CIA out of high school, No Easy Day says that she was recruited out of collegelike Carrie Mathison. The film is a cinematic page-turner, constructed on a simple architecture: the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, mainly from the perspective of a C.I.A. The Washington Post . Torture is depicted as indirectly but indubitably useful in the search for bin Laden (an assertion that has been denied by officials, as reported in the magazine by Dexter Filkins); a crucial piece of information in Mayas investigation is elicited from a prisoner who had been tortured and, now being fed a peaceful lunch, is threatened with more torture in the case of his non-coperation. | Suddenly, liberals find themselves the biggest proponents of the thin blue line.. Jessica Chastain had a remarkable year in 2011 bursting onto the scene with an Oscar-nominated role in The Help and didn't slow down in 2012.She tops off a busy year with a Oscar-nominated turn in Zero Dark Thirty, in wide release Jan. 11.She plays Maya, a CIA operative based on a real person, dedicated to following the lead that would eventually guide agents to Osama bin Laden. | Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. She has a "go get them" attitude which leads her to Pakistan. The C.I.A., and, in particular, Maya, are hard at work to uncover information regarding where bin Laden can be found, and are doing so on the assumption that, when hes found, the U.S. military will capture or kill him. Its like middle-schoolers with clearances.. Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed. Since the identities of many of the films real-life inspirations are kept under wraps, it is widely assumed that Maya is based on an actual CIA agent referred to as Jen or Miss 100 Percent.. CIA operatives normally operate in a dark, shadowy world, but Scheuers experiences found the spotlight. The movie suggests that those whose response to the attacks remains at the level of horror and anger are likely to accept extreme and morally repellent measures taken against anyone who seems connected with the perpetratorsand that these people hold a fanatical commitment to the death of bin Laden, a form of vengeance as justice. The implication seems to be that Jessica is that mother, whose real name was Jennifer Lynne Matthews. They do this to mainly prevent enemies from salvaging parts to use against them or others or stealing any advanced technology. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Rated R. Our ratings: V -7; L -7; S/N -2. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Bigelow spent a lot of time working out minute details of the climactic raid, including how the SEALs enter, what steps they are on as they climb up the floors, etc. Here is a look at the teams recent highlights and its portrayals in pop culture. Recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1999 immediately following her high school graduation, Maya, who has been solely working on the Al Qaeda file, gets her first field assignment in 2003 in Pakistan as an analyst working with an interrogation team. That's my guess. With Perianne Why can't we just scatter these hovermines everywhere to Everything Everywhere All At Once Takes Best Picture At New Image of Bill Skarsgrd and Jessica Roth in Official Poster for 'INSIDE' Starring Willem Dafoe. Are the terrorist attacks depicted in the film real? Did she have no family with whom she communicates, no friends with whom she discusses her work, her obsession with catching bin Laden, her ideas about life in general? (If there's romance in "Zero Dark Thirty" it is between hunter . Hollywood Catches Zero Dark Fever. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, IMDb's Most Anticipated New TV Series of 2023. non-mutilation torture, e.g. Maya is targeted by two gunmen and her position on the mission is compromised.Zero Dark Thirty: For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military oper. The scene where the CIA agents in Pakistan are accosted by two armed men on motorbikes is based on a genuine incident, but in real life the CIA officer killed them both. The naysayers who thought her previous hit, "The Hurt Locker" was a fluke/had help from her famous ex-husband James Cameron ( Titanic, Avatar and others) were incorrect and hopefully this movie will shut the naysayers up once . Zero Dark Thirty is a journalistic account of the ten year tracking of "UBL" (Osama bin Laden).Beginning with a black screen, the film opens with mere audible cries from the phone recordings . Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. The HUNT for Osama ~ from the INTEL side~ 4 STARS~ good movie, plot: THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADIN Thus, most of what you see in Zero Dark Thirty can be considered quite close to what historically happened. agent, Maya (Jessica Chastain), whose . I can't see them seriously recruiting high school kids because so much can change by the end of college. Yet, as debate in the wake of the Newtown murders revealed, theres a peculiar aspect to the argument made by partisans of gun control. While critics and political pundits have been writing about the films depiction of torture for weeks, audiences may still emerge with a few questions about the films inspirations. Michael Scheuer declined an interview request. Wait until they go through college so they don't have to waste a bunch of time training them. Told from the perspective of the CIA agents trying to track him down, the narrative takes a detailed look at the convoluted espionage process that went into finding the real-life terrorist. The entire Abbottabad compound in which Bin Laden was found was recreated to almost exact dimensions in Jordan to film the raid scenes. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. If anything, a former CIA officer might be in academia and perhaps think Maya would've been fit for the agency, and would suggest that she'd give it a shot. Ad Choices, as reported in the magazine by Dexter Filkins. Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks? the former official said. /. In the final scene, she leans her head back against the wall and starts to cry. The report also notes that, prior to 9/11, she supported the decision of a subordinate to withhold from the FBI the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers, who were on an FBI watch list at the time, had entered the country. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. Red Letter Media sells VHS copy of "Nukie" on eBay for Harry Melling talks about leaving Dudley Dursley behind Press J to jump to the feed. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Its a humanist cinema that constructs an ostensible humanism through the elimination of most of human experience. Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. The FAQ items below may give away important plot points. There are those who own firearms and those who dont; those who are familiar with the potential lethal use of forcewho are or were in the military or the police, who own firearms (according to recent polls, about forty-five percent of the country)and everyone else. Alternatively, she could have joined the armed forces straight out of high school and then joined the CIA from there.For the position 'Maya' held in the agency (a Targeter), it's extremely unlikely a high school student would be recruited. Thermite or plastic explosives are commonly used. I personally found her character more interesting than finding and killing bin Laden. The purpose of Zero Dark Thirty is to portray the trials and efforts behind finding Osama Bin Laden. It is one thing to sit. Zero Dark Thirty is the same kind of film, but even more so. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didnt deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said. Purpose of the making. Climate & Environment. The resulting so-called realism is always on the verge of becoming a grotesque lie, because of filmmakers unavowedly ideological assumptions regarding the depiction of physical action as more unimpeachably real than states of mind, regarding the selection of certain actions rather than others as constituting a storyor a film. In Vietnam, the Allies captured up to half a million documents a month from the Viet Cong, which allowed them to anticipate and largely thwart the famous Tet offensive. Now out of the CIA, Scheuers career has taken a turn: She is a life coach, running a business called YBeU Beauty, focusing on helping women look good, feel good, and do good. Maya and Carrie: A Tale of Two Devices. But only Maya is confident Bin Laden is where she says he is. Its impossible to know, of course, whether there is any real-life connection between the two characters. Ten years is a very long time. Women in War: Revisiting Zero Dark Thirty. Britain made progress against the IRA in the 1920s because the security forces captured so many of IRA leader Michael Collins' documents they had to create an entire department to read them all. Condition: Something went wrong. They married in 2014 and she took his name. One of the more obvious correlations between character and real-life inspiration is the key suspect in Mayas hunt, Bin Ladens courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The naysayers who thought her previous hit, "The Hurt Locker" was a fluke/had help from her famous ex-husband James Cameron( Titanic, Avatar and others) were incorrect and hopefully this movie will shut the naysayers up once and for all. Edit, "Zero Dark Thirty" is military slang for an unspecified time in the early hours of the morning before dawn. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, was with the SEALS during the compound raid, clad in special dog armor that can withstand clouds of hot shrapnel, and ready to sniff around for explosives or a secret hiding place for Bin Laden. She hit reply all to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. But the female targeter was one of the people from very early on pushing this courier approach. Silhouette of a woman by iStockphoto. The most difficult aspect of Zero Dark Thirty, the Kathryn Bigelow/Mark Boal dramatization of the ten year search for Osama bin Ladin, is not that the film depicts torture as a tool utilized by the United States of America, but that torture was used in reality, necessitating its appearance in fiction.The myth of American innocence is inexplicably powerful given the bulk of American history . In reality, Scheuer, who was then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, traveled to a classified CIA facility in 2002 and actually witnessed the torture of an al-Qaida suspect named Abu Zubaydah. Maya, the film's main character, spends a The much-discussed opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty features the main character Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, observing a detainee at a Though Zero Dark Thirty refers to Maya being recruited to the CIA out of high Direction was excellent but the story leaves us a little overly lacking in caring due to the long length of the movie~. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. CIA Director (James Gandolfini) Leon Panetta. All of the attacks depicted are based on real events but they are strung together as a connected narrative for the sake of the story; e.g., Maya being in the Marriott at the time of the bombing, which they were not in real life. 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