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Comment by Ryan Hawbecker on January 27, 2013 at 3:28pm

My Review of Zero Dark Thirty http://www.ryanhawbecker.com/2013/01/zero-dark-thirty-movie-review.html?spref=tw …

Comment by Mike Brown on January 18, 2013 at 5:17pm

Comment by AB7 on January 11, 2013 at 4:30pm

Is it just me, or do the Spill Crew constantly break their major rule in every review?  Don't go into a movie and judge it by your own preconceived expectations.  They did that with "The Dark Knight Rises," this, "The Hobbit," and so on.
Everything they complained about in this review only led to one thing: It wasn't the movie they personally wanted.

Comment by Rabid Scotsman on January 11, 2013 at 12:41pm

I love the Spill Crew to death but they have recently gotten on my nerves. First, it was their heavy criticism of Django Unchained, which is by no means a perfect movie. Its fine that they didn't love the film as much as 90% of other critics but when you start demonizing and even threaten to quit an organization based on their praise of a GOOD film, you start to walk a dangerous path. The movie offended them because the "n" word was used too much. However, 90% obviously didn't feel that way. They saw it, much like I do, as a neccesary device to establish the setting. 

Now, with Zero Dark Thirty, the Spill Crew has posted an extremely misguided review that shocked me. They have always been my go-to critics since 2008 but their biases are starting to creep into their reviews more and more. With the enourmous praise of Zero Dark Thirty by critics everywhere, the Spill Crew have made the unfortunate decision to judge the film against the enourmous expectations of other critics and not just as a film. It seems like they didn't even understand the nature of the film. Its about HOW we found Bin Laden. Wars aren't fought with conventional weapons anyore. The real warriors are sitting in chairs analyzing data for endless hours. It seems like they wanted some gung-ho action film. Not only would a film like that be heavily-ill advised, it would also be incredibly offensive, serving as an injustice to every person who helped catch him. The fact is that Zero Dark Thirty accomplished exactly what it does with perfection. Its at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes for a reason. It has won nearly every critics award for a reason. There's a reason it was nominated for 6 Oscars. Its not like their the Oscars are nominating shit. There's no Blind Side this year. Beasts of the Southern Wild and Amour got nominated for God's sake. Granted, the Academy still had some idiotic snubs like always but to say "everyone's full of shit" is fucking bullshit. To me, this review reeked of ego and "contrarian hipster". They always talk about going to see a movie with no bias and judging the film on its own merits. For Zero Dark Thirty, they failed to do so.

Comment by LunaticLMD on January 8, 2013 at 12:34am

I agree with Co-Host, Cyrus, and Leon on the review.

This review was funny.

Comment by Michael Kragseth on January 7, 2013 at 2:50pm

Based on true events or not , is it entertaining to watch? I would problably never give a light to day with this type of movie, since I can't stand military movies , for most part anyway:P

Comment by keh006 on January 7, 2013 at 1:41pm

@Lewis Nolan

Have you seen the film yet? Most of the stuff is not padding.

Comment by Adam Charles on January 7, 2013 at 10:28am

@Lewis Nolan

If you wanna consider RottenTomatoes as the barometer then ZDT currently totes an average rating of 8.8/10 where ARGO has 8.4/10. A higher percentage of critics liked Argo, but the critics that liked ZDT gave it a higher rating than what they gave ARGO.

Comment by Lewis Nolan on January 7, 2013 at 7:58am

For all of corey's talk about "the critics agree with me" he doesn't realize that the critics consider Argo to be a better film. Argo got 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and Zero Dark Thirty has 94%.

The worst part about the movie is the length, you know the padded this movie out by thirty minutes just to put it in Oscar contention, after all no movie less than two hours (other than crash) wins the Oscar for best picture.

Comment by MYTN on January 7, 2013 at 4:01am

This was actually one of my favorite films, and I wouldn't be surprised if it makes my top ten for this decade. It seems that the two main problems the Spill Crew have with this film are that 1. It overly focused on the bureaucratic aspect of this event 2. The characters were hollow.

I however felt that these are two of the film's strengths. I appreciated its detail to the bureaucratic process of the bin Laden assassination because it keeps itself updated with the way war is fought today. No longer is war only large fire fights, hallway shootouts, or mass carpet bombings; it requires soul-sucking intelligence gathering and monotonous data analysis. Our enemies are no longer just live bodies that we confront, they have become digital projections on a satellite monitor, video files on a laptop, or code names in a report. We fight a more virtual enemy nowadays and the film takes great care to dissect the process of these new challenges. 

That is why I think the hollowness of the characters elucidate how consumed they are by this mission. It drains them of leisure, of personality, of their own moral values, where they only become these emotionally hollow forces of nature. This movie, like many of Bigelow's other films (yes this includes Point Break -_-), focuses on the obsession of the protagonists, and the madness the characters bring upon themselves in order to achieve their goals.

Korey's comment that the film is "paced like a documentary" makes sense, and I believe is appropriate for the subject matter. Even the slow burn feel during the scenes involving CIA bureaucracy are nicely balanced with scenes involving major terrorist attacks so as to remind the audience of the stakes involved. By the end of the film, I was about as drained as the characters, and perhaps that is an effect of a film that some audiences may not appreciate.

Other films that those who like "Zero Dark Thirty" may want to check out (or perhaps want to see films that improve upon "Zero Dark Thirty") are "The Conversation" and "The Lives of Others", about spies who are are psychologically swallowed up by their tasks, "Army of Shadows," a film about the French resistance against the Nazis that showed how even fighting the good fight is a ruthless and thankless task, and "The Battle of Algiers", a film about the Algerian resistance against the French colonists which also presents the moral ambiguities of war.

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