Its revealed, near the end of the movie, that she was recruited for the C.I.A. A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader. NEW YORK -- The Washington Post ran a front-page story Tuesday about the CIA agent who serves as the model for Maya, one of the the main characters in "Zero Dark Thirty," a much-anticipated film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. 3:20 PM. I can see why she won so many awards for this movie. That's my guess. While some of the movies details differ slightlyMaya is recruited out of high school, not college, before working on the operation for a full decadeother Jen-related passages from the book read like the shooting script for Zero Dark Thirty. Theres nothing radical about the movies aesthetic; exactly the opposite: its conventionally vigorous, action-centered realism wouldnt be out of place in a movie by Sidney Lumetor Ben Affleck. But in a broad sense, she said waterboarding cited in government reports was not torture, insisted such techniques can work and said any criticism of her was largely the result of her taking risks to combat terrorism. Edit, After blowing up the downed helicopter, the SEALs fly bin Laden's body to the U.S. operating base in Afghanistan. But theres something perverse about approaching Zero Dark Thirty as exciting action entertainment: its based on real events and real people, and, in surprisingly many ways, its subject is at the very core of contemporary American politics: the use of force by the United States governmentwhich, in the film, is headed by the torture of prisoners suspected of association with Al Qaeda, and continues to the military action that resulted in bin Ladens death. 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. They do not recruit high-school kids. Whats a company secret you can share now that you dont What quietly went away without anyone noticing? Why did the SEAL team destroy the downed chopper? Powered by WordPress.com VIP. The movie is exciting to watchthe director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, organize the action to maximize suspense, subjecting Maya to a range of dangers and, at the point when she thinks that she has circumstantially located bin Laden, starting the equivalent of a ticking clock that stokes the thrills even more. Just like Maya, "Jen" considers the probability of bin Laden being in the house at 100% whilst others are more cautious, she observes the mission from the control room, is there to meet the SEALs when they return with bin Laden's corpse and bursts out crying afterwards.In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on American torture practices during the war on terror which referenced the influence of another CIA agent who was used as part of the composite character Maya. In the film Zero Dark Thirty, she was the persistent, conscientious CIA officer who finally tracked Osama bin Laden to his lair. User Reviews Ultimately, Zero Dark Thirty is a strikingly accurate film when it comes to recreating the details of the years leading up to the capture and the decisive mission itself. She unzips it, takes a long, hard look at the face, and confirms that it belongs to bin Laden. 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 material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. She believes a male operative would not have been described the same way. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. 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 . Its the first interview she has ever done, she said, and she decided to speak to make clear she was not forced out of the agency but left on her own terms. The first dramatic scenes show a secret interrogation room in which a captive is subjected to torture by American agents. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies. Metacritic Reviews. Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. 1 3. The raid itself is one long boring anti-climax, pretty much like the rest of this movie. Edit, Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatized account of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Isaiah 59:14. Why does Bigelow show only ones associated with Al Qaeda? She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week. Entdecke Zero Dark Thirty (DVD, 2013) in groer Auswahl Vergleichen Angebote und Preise Online kaufen bei eBay Kostenlose Lieferung fr viele Artikel! But the juxtaposition is striking. That's probably poetic license on the part of the screenwriter. The movies depiction of the practice of torture has come to dominate discussion. Abu Ahmed (Tushaar Mehra) - Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti Edit, That's probably poetic license on the part of the screenwriter. A debriefer is a subject matter expert who asks questions., The CIAs press secretary, Susan Miller, declined to comment about Scheuer, but said simply: CIAs use of enhanced interrogation techniques ended in 2007.. Scheuer retired in 2021 as the Deputy Chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats, and in her subsequent interview (which was also the first interview she had ever done), she clarified that she had not been let go but had left the CIA on her own accord. Credited in the movie by its formal abbreviation, the compound raid crew of DEVGRU (a shortening of the long-winded United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group) is represented by several actors including Chris Pratt (who plays Justin) and Joel Edgerton (who plays a squadron team leader named Patrick). The spaces before your punctuation are bothersome. Zero Dark Thirty starts with a sonic montage of calls from victims of the 9/11 attacks, and that montage is followed swiftly by the first scenes of torture at a secret site of extraordinary rendition. The suggestion is that many American viewers reliably visceral response to the horrific sounds of 9/11 victims facing imminent death parallels the visceral response of many in government, and that the overheatedly emotional reaction led ineluctably to widespread arrests, secret renditions, and interrogation under tortureto a government that approved and engaged in these practices and to public opinion that accepted them. A high school graduate has the basic skills but hasn't yet been molded. It made me wonder if there was some family connection or I-don't-know-what that would have made her the exception to be recruited out of high school. Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty, and Claire Danes in Homeland. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. 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. Its the voice of the teacher or the analyst or the self-restraining parent whose blank false mask of benevolent authority and patient tolerance is actually filled with attitudinizing judgment and narrowly normative limits of acceptable, admissible feelings and actions. Or is she luring viewers to make the same association and assumption, to put the viewer into complicity with those in the C.I.A. says he was not waterboarded. Won Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, many other Nominations. 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. Available on Prime Video, iTunes, HBO Max. What we are shown is the apparent sheer will to destroy the United States and its allies, as suggested (only by implication) by the depictions of attacks in London, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and the failed attack in Times Square in 2010. decluttr_store. The majority of the movie is focused on one female CIA agent and her struggle against the dim witted male chauvinistic CIA management types which seek to minimize her accomplishments and hamper her innate abilities.UH HUGH. It seems almost uncoincidental? By contrast, Zero Dark Thirty offers no ideological context for Al Qaedas attacksno statement of principles from jihadi sites, no religious exhortations, no practical demands or litany of complaints. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Why are the SEALs rifling through the house after killing bin Laden? Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just to entertain readers. Still, the similarities between Carrie and Maya go beyond gender. Yes December 28, 2012. Greg Miller is an investigative foreign correspondent based in London for The Washington Post and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Read our extensive list of rules for more information on other types of posts like fan-art and self-promotion, or message the moderators if you have any questions. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. While not naming the agent, even with a pseudonym, the report is highly critical of her work, stating that she was a primary advocate for ineffective torture techniques and that she lied to Congress in an effort to misrepresent the effectiveness of the CIA's torture program. She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. 1 at the box office. She then boards a transport plane where she is told to sit anywhere because hers is the only name on the manifest. A report in the Washington Post notes the unpopularity of Mayas real-life counterpart in the agency and describes Maya as a combative person quite a bit like the character played by Chastain. Its important to note that high-ranking female CIA officers are no longer an anomaly. The most solid lead is his most trusted currier. According to news reports, the suicide bomber was a trusted source who turned out to be a double agent working for al-Qaeda. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The helicopter crash is filmed in total darkness, from inside the chopper, with the crash simulated by jerking the camera violentlyWOW FOOLED ME!!! dude you got lucky. She was, he says, our go-to analyst on all intelligence questions regarding the target. 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. Ex-CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer is shown in a screenshot of her beauty and life coaching website YBeU beauty personal coaching. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked. What is SSE? kingfish-4400. They have thousands of agents that went to college, had prior jobs, most who's problem solving has been narrowed into the same type of thought and technique. Edit, "Zero Dark Thirty" is military slang for an unspecified time in the early hours of the morning before dawn. Both are often at odds with their superiors. The character is played by Jessica Chastain. It is a world removed from her prior life, with the website featuring photos of her, thoughtful and confident. One of the last bits of casting news revealed ahead of the release of Zero Dark Thirty was that James Gandolfini would play the role of Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA who oversaw the Bin Laden raid. The new unit was called Alec Station, headed by a CIA analyst named Michael Scheuer. Zero Dark Thirty (DVD, 2012) Condition: Very good Comes with Case & Artwork Zero Dark Thirty (DVD, 2012) Condition: Very good Comes with Case & Artwork . The former CIA agent also spoke about the incidence of torture in the form of waterboarding to extract information. Thermite or plastic explosives are commonly used. In fact, the movie presents torture as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the attacks. Scheuer will not say if she agreed with her husbands ideas but said she debates him on some issues. 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. Why weren't the occupants of the house not more alarmed at the approach of the helicopters? In fact, the CIA reportedly gave Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow unprecedented access to information for the making of the film. Zero Dark Thirty is, however, a little bit different. Scheuer disputes that the CIA was at fault. Direction was excellent but the story leaves us a little overly lacking in caring due to the long length of the movie~. Slideshow 2066662 by yachi The movies release was delayed amid criticism that it amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama. This was to avoid blowing the covers of the real-life agents whose stories are depicted on screen. . Zero Dark Thirty suggests that theres a lot of violence being done in the world by bin Laden and his followers; it offers little confidence in the power of diplomacy to oppose it (as, for instance, in the scenes suggesting the betrayal of a C.I.A. Zero Dark Thirty is kind of a slow start, both in terms of Maya's character study and the hunt for bin Laden, but it picks up by the ending big time. During the scene where Maya is angry of at CIA that she found Osama Bin Laden and wrote its 52 days that she found the house, the BGM is from the telugu film Leader. Previously This is worth watching ONCE. 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. After Obama took office, CIA operatives reexamined several potential trails, including al-Qaedas use of couriers to hand-deliver messages to and from bin Laden. U.S. officials acknowledged that Boal met with Mayas real-life counterpart and other CIA officers, typically in the presence of someone from the agencys public affairs office. Bigelow, no orthodox Bazinian, deploys a familiar, conventional repertory of the techniques of coded Hollywood realism, including rapid-fire editing and hand-held cameras, to ratchet up excitement, involvement, identification, suspense, which the storys own gaps and elisions undercut, throwing the viewer into the position of having been entertained by things that really arent much fun and rooting for things that make a viewer then wonder why. 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 . Zero Dark Thirty. Did they still go up to 007, if you couldn't yet count that high? 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. For five years, she becomes obsessed to find Osama and in 2011, the terrorist leader of Al-Qaeda is killed by the U.S. Navy SEAL Team following the lead of Maya. Better than a sleeping pill. After seven CIA operatives are killed in a suicide double-cross at Camp Chapman, Afghanistan-including (in a move as old as Homer) her only near-friend (Jennifer Ehle)--it's not Vin Diesel but Maya who pledges, "I'm going to smoke everyone involved in this op, and . Something went wrong. and has been religiously devoted to bin Laden ever since. She is a reluctant participant in extreme duress applied to the detainees, but believes that the truth may only be obtained through such tactics. "The CIA is a lot different than Hollywood portrays it to be," reads an official explainer issued today by the Central Intelligence Agency a thinly veiled attempt to continue debunking Zero Dark Thirty, the controversial Oscar favorite that its director admittedly hates.Referring to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent, depictions of "shootouts and high speed chases," and scenes of "CIA . The Hurt Locker functioned at two levelsit depicted a mission that targeted the perpetrators of monstrous deeds but that had a terrible effect on the soldiers who took part in it; it was both ambiguous and not. For several years, she is single-minded in her pursuit of leads to uncover the whereabouts of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama Bin Laden. I know the CIA has like a "internship" program for high-school kids but you seek them out. 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. He asks how she joined the Agency and her reply is along the lines of: "I was recruited out of High School." When he asks for more detail she says she's not allowed to say. But the ending isnt about Maya, its about the viewers interpretations; one is sent off with a litany of talking points. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. In the film, the CIA recruits Maya out of high school, and later it was deduced that the character is partly based on former CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer. Maya is a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst, recruited "out of high school" around 1999, tasked with finding the al-Qaeda leader Osama . Michael Scheuer has in recent years espoused conspiracy theories, and called on then president Donald Trump to impose martial law after he lost the 2020 election. The targeters contacts with the Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers have also been examined as part of an inquiry, apparently by the CIA inspector general, into the information that agency officials shared with outsiders about the bin Laden raid. 007, if you could n't yet been molded that you dont What quietly went away without noticing... 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