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Zero Dark Thirty

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Zero Dark Thirty
Theatrical release poster
Directed byKathryn Bigelow
Written byMark Boal
Produced byMark Boal
Kathryn Bigelow
Megan Ellison
StarringJessica Chastain
Jason Clarke
Joel Edgerton
CinematographyGreig Fraser
Edited byDylan Tichenor
William Goldenberg
Music byAlexandre Desplat
Production
company
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
  • December 19, 2012 (2012-12-19)
Running time
157 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$40,000,000[2]
Box office$96,377,998[2]

Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American historical drama film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. Billed as "the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man," the film is a dramatization of the United States operation that found and killed Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda. It was produced by Boal, Bigelow, and Megan Ellison.

It stars Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, and Édgar Ramírez.[3][4] It was independently financed by Ellison's Annapurna Pictures. The film had its premiere in Los Angeles, California on December 18, 2012 and had its wide release on January 11, 2013.[5]

Zero Dark Thirty received wide critical acclaim and was nominated for five Academy Awards for the 85th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Jessica Chastain) and Best Original Screenplay. Zero Dark Thirty earned four Golden Globe Award nominations, including Best Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Actress – Drama for Chastain, which she won.

It has also generated controversy, both for graphic portrayal of torture of suspects and for what is described by some as a misleading portrayal of torture as critical to the United States' success in gaining information on bin Laden's associates and location. In addition, Republicans suggested that the filmmakers were given improper access to classified materials, which they and the Obama administration denied.

Plot

In 2003, Maya, a young CIA officer, has spent her entire brief career, since she graduated from high school, focusing solely on intelligence related to Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, following the terrorist organization's September 11 attacks in the United States. She has just been reassigned to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan to work with a fellow officer, Dan. During the first months of her assignment, Maya often accompanies Dan to a black site for his continuing interrogation of Ammar, a detainee with suspected links to several Saudi terrorists. Dan subjects the detainee to torture, including waterboarding, and humiliation. He and Maya eventually trick Ammar into divulging that an old acquaintance, who is using the alias 'Abu Ahmed', is working as a personal courier for bin Laden. Other detainees corroborate this, with some claiming Abu Ahmed delivers messages between bin Laden and a man referred to as Abu Faraj. In mid-2005, Abu Faraj is apprehended by the CIA and local police in Pakistan. Maya interrogates Abu Faraj under torture, but he continues to deny knowing a courier with such a name. Maya interprets this as Abu Faraj's trying to conceal the importance of Abu Ahmed.

The film shows how Maya develops from a freshman into a veteran officer while portraying how the analysts must sift through masses of data and information, using a variety of technology, hunches and sharing insights. Displaying the zeal and frustrations of a 'single-tasker', she concentrates on finding Abu Ahmed, determined to use him to find bin Laden. During a span of five years, she survives the 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing as well as being shot at in her car by armed men. Dan, departing on re-assignment, warns Maya about a possible change in politics, suggesting that the new administration may prosecute those officers who had been involved in torture. Maya's fellow officer and friend Jessica is killed in the 2009 Camp Chapman attack. A Jordanian detainee claims the man previously identified as Abu Ahmed, from a photograph, is a man he personally buried in 2001. Several CIA officers— Maya's seniors — conclude the target who could be Abu Ahmed is long dead, and that they have searched a false trail for nine years.

A fellow analyst researching Moroccan intelligence archives comes to Maya and suggests that Abu Ahmed is 'Ibrahim Sayeed'. Maya agrees and contacts Dan, who is working at the CIA headquarters. Maya has found that Ibrahim Sayeed had a brother, Habib, and theorizes the CIA's supposed photograph of Abu Ahmed was of Habib. He bore a striking resemblance to Ibrahim and was killed in Afghanistan.

Dan uses CIA funds to purchase a Lamborghini for a Kuwaiti prince in exchange for the telephone number of Sayeed's mother. The CIA traces calls to the mother, and one caller's persistent use of tradecraft to avoid detection leads Maya to conclude the caller is Abu Ahmed. (Computer-aided voice recognition analysis is shown, among the many technologies.) At Maya's behest and with the support of her supervisors, numerous CIA operatives are deployed to search for and identify Abu Ahmed; they locate him in his vehicle and eventually track him to a large urban compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the national military academy.

The CIA puts the compound under heavy surveillance for several months, using a variety of methods, but cannot prove bin Laden is there. Meanwhile, the President's National Security Advisor tasks the CIA with producing a plan to capture or kill bin Laden if it can be confirmed that he is in the compound. An agency team devises a plan to use two top-secret stealth helicopters (developed at Area 51) flown by the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to secretly enter Pakistan and insert a U.S. Navy SEAL team to raid the compound. Before briefing U.S. President Obama, the CIA Director (presumed to be Leon Panetta, though never explicitly named) holds a meeting of his top officials, who assess only a 60-80% chance that bin Laden is living in the compound, rather than another high-value target. (Maya, also in attendance, asserts the chances are 100%.)

The raid is approved by President Obama and is executed on May 2, 2011. Although execution is complicated by one of the helicopters crashing (and rousing the neighborhood), the US has backup and the SEALs kill a man on the compound's top floor who is revealed to be bin Laden. (They also kill other men and a woman in the course of the raid). They bring bin Laden's body back to a U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where Maya and other CIA and military officers wait. She views the body and visually confirms it is bin Laden. Maya is last seen boarding a military C-130 to return to the US and sitting in its vast interior as its only passenger. The pilot asks her where she wants to go but she doesn't reply and instead starts crying, realising now that although her hunt for Bin Laden has been successful, all direction in her life has been lost.

Cast

Production

Titles

The film's working title was For God and Country.[7] The title Zero Dark Thirty was officially confirmed at the end of the film's teaser trailer.[8] Bigelow has explained that "it's a military term for 30 minutes after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that cloaked the entire decade-long mission."[9]

Writing

Bigelow and Boal had initially worked on and finished a screenplay centered on the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora, and the unsuccessful efforts to find bin Laden in the region. Their film was also going to portray the long and unsuccessful hunt for bin Laden. The two were about to begin filming when news broke that bin Laden had been killed.

They immediately shelved the film they had been working on and redirected their focus, essentially starting from scratch. "But a lot of the homework I’d done for the first script and a lot of the contacts I made, carried over,” Boal remarked during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He added, "The years I had spent talking to military and intelligence operators involved in counter-terrorism was helpful in both projects. Some of the sourcing I had developed long, long ago continued to be helpful for this version."[10]

The character of Maya is based on a composite of two female CIA officers, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey. Alfreda who is in her late 40s or early 50s is a redhead which was represented in the film's character while Michael Anne Casey is in her early to mid thirties. Both officers have worked closely together since the late 90s.[11] Their colleagues said that the film's portrayal of the officers captures their "dedication and combative temperament".[12]

Filming

Parts of the film were shot at PEC University of Technology in Chandigarh, India. Some parts of Chandigarh were designed to look like Lahore and Abbottabad in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was found and killed on May 2, 2011.[13] Local protesters expressed anti-bin Laden and anti-Pakistan sentiments as they objected to Pakistani locations being portrayed on Indian land.[14][15]

The national security expert Peter Bergen was one who reviewed an early cut of the film as an unpaid adviser; he said at the time that the film's torture scenes "were overwrought". Boal said they were "toned down" in the final cut.[16]

Music

Alexandre Desplat composed the film's score.[17] The score, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was released as a soundtrack album by Madison Gate Records on December 19, 2012.[18]

Soundtrack track listing

No.TitleLength
1."Flight To Compound"5:07
2."Drive to Embassy"1:44
3."Bombings"3:46
4."Ammar"4:06
5."Monkeys"2:59
6."Northern Territories"3:46
7."Seals Take Off"2:34
8."21 Days"2:04
9."Preparation For Attack"1:45
10."Balawi"3:15
11."Dead End"3:26
12."Maya on Plane"3:59
13."Area 51"1:42
14."Tracking Calls"3:46
15."Picket Lines"3:03
16."Towers"2:02
17."Chopper"1:48
18."Back to Base"2:41

Marketing

Electronic Arts promoted Zero Dark Thirty in its video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter by offering downloadable maps of locations depicted in the film. Additional maps for the game were made available on December 19, to coincide with the film's initial release. Electronic Arts donates $1 to nonprofit organizations that support veterans for each Zero Dark Thirty map pack sold.[19]

Reception

Critical response

As of December 23, 2012, the film has been met with wide acclaim from film critics, currently holding a 94% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 170 reviews and an average rating of 8.8/10,[20] as well as a score of 95 on Metacritic based on 36 reviews. It is the best-reviewed film of 2012 according to Metacritic.[21]

Reviewing the film, Times critic Manohla Dargis said Zero Dark Thirty

"shows the dark side of that war. It shows the unspeakable and lets us decide if the death of Bin Laden was worth the price we paid." Continued Dargis: "There is much else to say about the movie, which ends with the harrowing siege of Bin Laden’s hideaway by the Navy SEALs (played by, among others, Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt), much of it shot to approximate the queasy, weirdly unreal green of night-vision goggles. Ms. Bigelow’s direction here is unexpectedly stunning, at once bold and intimate: she has a genius for infusing even large-scale action set pieces with the human element. One of the most significant images is of a pool of blood on a floor. It’s pitiful, really, and as the movie heads toward its emphatically non-triumphant finish, it is impossible not to realize with anguish that all that came before — the pain, the suffering and the compromised ideals — has led to this." Dargis designated the film a The New York Times critics' pick.[22]

Richard Corliss' review in Time magazine called it "a fine" movie and "a police procedural on the grand scale," saying it "blows Argo out of the water."[23] Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter said, "it could well be the most impressive film Bigelow has made, as well as possibly her most personal." Peter Debruge of Variety said: "The ultra-professional result may be easier to respect than enjoy, but there's no denying its power." Critic Katey Rich of The Guardian said: "Telling a nearly three-hour story with an ending everyone knows, Bigelow and Boal have managed to craft one of the most intense and intellectually challenging films of the year."[24] Calling Zero Dark Thirty "a milestone in post-Sept. 11 cinema," critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times listed the film at number six of the top 10 films of 2012.[25]

Writing in The New Yorker, film critic David Denby lauded the filmmakers for their approach. "The virtue of Zero Dark Thirty," wrote Denby, "is that it pays close attention to the way life does work; it combines ruthlessness and humanity in a manner that is paradoxical and disconcerting yet satisfying as art." But Denby faulted the filmmakers for getting lodged on the divide between fact and fiction.

"Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal — the team behind The Hurt Locker — want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project."[26]

Steve Coll criticized the early claims for "journalism" with the use of composite characters. He took issue with the film's using the names of historical figures and details of their lives for characters, such as using details for "Ammar" to suggest that he was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, whose nom de guerre was Ammar al-Baluchi. Coll said the facts about him were different than portrayed in the film, which suggests the detainee will never leave the black site. Al-Baluchi was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006 for a military tribunal.

Coll writes,

"He has been an active, defiant participant in Guantánamo court proceedings and his lawyers have sought permission from military judges to introduce evidence in his defense that he was tortured while in CIA custody, and to pursue information about the identities of the agency officers who interrogated him."[27]

The Washington Post's critic Ann Hornaday, who named Zero Dark Thirty as the year's best film, noted the divergent takes on the film: "As Boal and Bigelow gather critics’ plaudits and awards, the movie itself has entered a fascinating parallel conversation – part food fight for cable-news channels desperate for post-election fodder, part valuable (if belated) civic debate."[28] Writing in the Los Angeles Times, critic

Kenneth Turan singled out actress Chastain for her performance. "Her single-minded ferocity and stubbornness not only prove essential in the hunt, but also make up the emotional through line that engages us in the story of Zero Dark Thirty."[29]

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, film critic Joe Morgenstern said:

"This is the work of a commanding filmmaker who is willing, as well as able, to confront a full spectrum of moral ambiguity." After noting the controversy, he wrote: "Others will debate the facts, but I can tell you that Zero Dark Thirty does not apologize for torture, any more than it denounces it. What it does in the course of telling a seminal story of our time is what contemporary films so rarely do, serve as brilliant provocation."[30]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four. He said:

"The film's opening scenes are not great filmmaking. They're heavy on jargon and impenetrable calculation, murky and heavy on theory." He went on, "My guess is that much of the fascination with this film is inspired by the unveiling of facts, unclearly seen. There isn't a whole lot of plot — basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is."[31]

David Edelstein said that "[a]s a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic", but "[a]s a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping – an unholy masterwork."[32] The journalist Matt Taibbi wrote:

"The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn't who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we've become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it."[33]

Box office

The limited release of Zero Dark Thirty grossed $417,150 in the United States and Canada in only five theaters.[2] A wide release followed on January 11.

Entertainment Weekly wrote, "The controversial Oscar contender easily topped the chart in its first weekend of wide release with $24.4 million."[34]

As of February 3, 2013, Zero Dark Thirty has grossed $77,673,978 in the U.S. and Canada, along with $13,000,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total of $90,673,978.[2] It was the top-grossing film of its wide release premiere weekend.[35]

Accolades

Main article: List of accolades received by Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty has been nominated for five Academy Awards at the upcoming 85th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Zero Dark Thirty was nominated for four Golden Globe Awards at the 70th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama for Chastain, who took home the award.

The Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association's award for Best Director was given to Kathryn Bigelow, the second time the honor has gone to a woman (the first also being Bigelow for The Hurt Locker). The film swept critics groups' awards for Best Director and Best Picture including the Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago and Boston film critics associations.[36]

Prequel

Mark Boal has stated his interest in making the original film on the 2001 Tora Bora hunt for Bin Laden he and Bigelow conceived. That finished screenplay had been set aside after Bin Laden was killed in 2011 to focus on what became Zero Dark Thirty. “I love reporting, so being on a big story is really exciting to me,” said Boal, a former war journalist, of his scramble to write a new script after the event. “But nobody likes to throw out two years of work.”[37]

Political controversies

Allegations of partisanship

Partisan political controversy arose related to the film before shooting began.[10] Opponents of the Obama Administration charged that Zero Dark Thirty was scheduled for an October release just before the November presidential election to support his re-election, as Obama achieved the execution of bin Laden.[38][39] Sony denied that politics was a factor in release scheduling and said the date was the best available spot for an action-thriller in a crowded lineup. The film's screenwriter added, "the president is not depicted in the movie. He's just not in the movie."[40]

The distributor Columbia Pictures, sensitive to political perceptions, considered rescheduling the film release for as late as early 2013. It set a limited-release date for December 19, 2012, well after the election and rendering moot any alleged political conflict.[7][41][42][43][44] The nationwide release date was pushed back to January 11, 2013, moving it out of the crowded Christmas period and closer to the Academy Awards.[45] After the film's limited-release, given the controversy related to the film's depiction of torture and its role in gaining critical information, The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni concluded that the film is "a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be".[46]

Allegations of improper access to classified information

Several Republican sources charged the Obama Administration of improperly providing Bigelow and her team access to classified information during their research for the film. These charges, along with charges of other leaks to the media, became a prevalent election season talking point by conservatives. The Republican national convention party platform even claimed Obama "has tolerated publicizing the details of the operation to kill the leader of Al Qaeda."[42] None has been proven.[47]

The Republican congressman Peter T. King requested that the CIA and the U.S. Defense Department investigate if classified information was inappropriately released; both departments said they would look into it.[48] The CIA responded to Congressman King writing, "the protection of national security equities – including the preservation of our ability to conduct effective counterterrorism operations – is the decisive factor in determining how the CIA engages with filmmakers and the media as a whole."[49]

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch publicized CIA and Defense Department documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and alleged that "unusual access to agency information" was granted to the filmmakers. But, an examination of the documents showed no evidence that classified information was leaked to the filmmakers. In addition, CIA records did not show any involvement by the White House in relation to the filmmakers.[7][42] The filmmakers have said they were not given access to classified details about Osama bin Laden's killing.[50]

In January 2013, Reuters reported that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee will review the contacts between the CIA and the filmmakers to find out whether Bigelow and Boal had inappropriate access to classified information.[51]

Allegations of pro-torture stance

The film has been both criticized and praised for its handling of subject matter, including the portrayal of harsh interrogation and torture. The use of torture was long kept secret by the Bush administration and described as enhanced interrogation techniques. (See Torture Memos). Glenn Greenwald, in The Guardian, stated that the film takes a pro-torture stance, describing it as "pernicious propaganda" and stating that it "presents torture as its CIA proponents and administrators see it: as a dirty, ugly business that is necessary to protect America."[52] The critic Frank Bruni concluded that the film appears to suggest "No waterboarding, no Bin Laden".[46] Jesse David Fox writes that the film "doesn't explicitly say that torture caught bin Laden, but in portraying torture as one part of the successful search, it can be read that way."[53] Emily Bazelon said, "The filmmakers didn’t set out to be Bush-Cheney apologists", but "they adopted a close-to-the-ground point of view, and perhaps they’re in denial about how far down the path to condoning torture this led them."[54] Peter Maass of The Atlantic said the film "represents a troubling new frontier of government-embedded filmmaking."[55]

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, wrote that Bigelow was

"milk[ing] the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked." She said: by "excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation techniques' played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden."[56]

The author Greg Mitchell wrote that "the film’s depiction of torture helping to get bin Laden is muddled at best—but the overall impression by the end, for most viewers, probably will be: Yes, torture played an important (if not the key) role."[57] Filmmaker Alex Gibney called the film a "stylistic masterwork" but criticized the "irresponsible and inaccurate" depiction of torture, writing:

"there is no cinematic evidence in the film that EITs led to false information - lies that were swallowed whole because of the misplaced confidence in the efficacy of torture. Most students of this subject admit that torture can lead to the truth. But what Boal/Bigelow fail to show is how often the CIA deluded itself into believing that torture was a magic bullet, with disastrous results."[58]

The journalist Steve Coll, who has written on foreign policy, national security and the Bin Laden family, criticized the filmmakers for saying the film was "journalistic," which implies that it is based in fact. At the same time, they claimed artistic license, which he described "as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden".[27] Coll wrote that "arguably, the film’s degree of emphasis on torture's significance goes beyond what even the most die-hard defenders of the CIA interrogation regime [...] have argued," as he said it was shown as critical at several points.[27]

U.S. Senator John McCain, who was tortured during his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, said upon watching the film that it left him sick — "because it’s wrong." In a speech in the Senate, he said, "Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed, it actually produced false and misleading information."[59] McCain and fellow senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin sent a critical letter to Michael Lynton, chairman of the film's distributor, Sony Pictures Entertainment, stating, "[W]ith the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers and your production studio are perpetuating the myth that torture is effective. You have a social and moral obligation to get the facts right."[60]

Michael Morell, the CIA's acting director, sent a public letter on December 21, 2012 to the agency's employees, which said that Zero Dark Thirty

"takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate" and that the film "creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false. (...) [T]he truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved."[61]

The Huffington Post writer, G. Roger Denson, countered this, saying that the filmmakers were being made scapegoats for information openly admitted by government and intelligence officials. Denson said that Leon Panetta, three days after Osama bin Laden's death, seemed to say that waterboarding was a means of extracting reliable and crucial information in the hunt for bin Laden.[62] Denson noted Panetta speaking as the CIA chief in May 2011, saying that "enhanced interrogation techniques were used to extract information that led to the mission's success." Panetta said waterboarding was among the techniques used.[63] In a Huffington Post article written a week later, Denson cited other statements from Bush government officials saying that torture had yielded information to locate bin Laden.[62]

The national security reporter Spencer Ackerman said the film "does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet".[64] The critic Glenn Kenny said that he "saw a movie that subverted a lot of expectations concerning viewer identification and empathy" and that "rather than endorsing the barbarity, the picture makes the viewer in a sense complicit with it", which is "[a] whole other can of worms".[65] The writer Andrew Sullivan said, "the movie is not an apology for torture, as so many have said, and as I have worried about. It is an exposure of torture. It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years".[66] Critic Andrew O'Hehir, although admitting that the author's position on torture in the film is ambiguous, said creative choices were made and the film poses "excellent questions for us to ask ourselves, arguably defining questions of the age, and I think the longer you look at them the thornier they get".[67]

The screenwriter Mark Boal described the pro-torture accusations as "preposterous", stating that "it’s just misreading the film to say that it shows torture leading to the information about bin Laden", while director Bigelow added: "Do I wish [torture] was not part of that history? Yes. But it was."[68] The writer Mark Bowden argued that the film is neither pro- nor anti-torture, stating: "[P]ure storytelling is not always about making an argument, no matter how worthy. It can be simply about telling the truth."[69] In an interview with Time magazine, Bigelow said: " I’m proud of the movie, and I stand behind it completely. I think that it’s a deeply moral movie that questions the use of force. It questions what was done in the name of finding bin Laden."[70] In a 2013 interview on The Colbert Report, Bigelow said the film showed many techniques of intelligence gathering used to find Bin Laden, such as electronic surveillance, troops at the ground level, and "good old fashion sleuthing".[71]

References

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  2. ^ a b c d "Zero Dark Thirty (2012)". Box Office Mojo. Amazon.com. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
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  4. ^ UPI takes territories on Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty; Screen Daily; May 15, 2012
  5. ^ "Zero Dark Thirty" premieres in Los Angeles CBS News, December 11, 2012.
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  7. ^ a b c No conspiracy: New documents explain Pentagon, CIA cooperation on 'Zero Dark Thirty'; Entertainment Weekly; August 28, 2012
  8. ^ Bin Laden movie trailer is out; filmmakers are talking; azcentral.com; August 6, 2012
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  13. ^ "Chandigarh turns Lahore". The Times of India. March 3, 2012.
  14. ^ "VHP, Shiv Sena protest against Osama film". The Times of India. March 3, 2012.
  15. ^ Williams, Matthias (March 7, 2012). "Hindus protest bin Laden film shoot in north India". Reuters. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  16. ^ Bergen, Peter (December 11, 2012). "'Zero Dark Thirty': Did torture really net bin Laden?". CNN. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
  17. ^ "Alexandre Desplat to Score Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty'". Film Music Reporter. Retrieved November 7, 2012.
  18. ^ "'Zero Dark Thirty' Soundtrack Details". Film Music Reporter. December 10, 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  19. ^ 'Zero Dark Thirty' to be promoted in 'Medal of Honor' video game; Los Angeles Times; September 10, 2012
  20. ^ "Zero Dark Thirty - Rotten Tomatoes". Retrieved December 31, 2012.
  21. ^ "Zero Dark Thirty - Metacritic". Retrieved December 23, 2012.
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  23. ^ "Zero Dark Thirty: The Girl Who Got Bin Laden". Retrieved November 25, 2012.
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  25. ^ Scott, A. O. (December 14, 2012). "25 Favorites from a Year When 10 Aren't Enough". The New York Times. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  26. ^ Denby, David (December 24, 2012). "'Dead Reckoning'". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 17, 2012.
  27. ^ a b c Coll, Steve. "'Disturbing' & 'Misleading'". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved January 11, 2013.
  28. ^ Hornaday, Ann (December 13, 2012'). "'Zero Dark Thirty' and the new reality of reported filmmaking". The Washington Post. Retrieved December 14, 2012. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  29. ^ Turan, Kenneth (December 18, 2012'). "Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' tracks Bin Laden's dramatic takedown". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 18, 2012. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  30. ^ Morgenstern, Joe (December 18, 2012'). "In 'Zero Dark Thirty,' Zealotry in Pursuit of Zealots". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 19, 2012. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  31. ^ Ebert, Roger (January 2, 2013). "Zero Dark Thirty". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved January 4, 2013.
  32. ^ Edelstein, David (December 10, 2012). "Edelstein: Zero Dark Thirty Is Borderline Fascistic ... and a Masterpiece". Vulture. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  33. ^ Taibbi, Matt (January 16, 2013). "'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America". Rolling Stone. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
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  35. ^ Subers, Ray. "Weekend Report: Controversial 'Zero Dark Thirty' Claims Top Spot". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
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