Esquire has a big feature on the SEAL who shot Osama Bin Laden, headlined “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden… Is Screwed,” and if that doesn’t make you want to read it, nothing I can say is going to. It’s a great (and necessary) read, but for our purposes, the section on the actual Bin Laden killing is of interest. One of the main thrusts of criticism in my Zero Dark Thirty review was that it didn’t show a single discussion about whether the Bin Laden mission was a kill mission, and that no one ever even used a euphemism for killing when they were talking about it ahead of time. I thought it was weak that they just left that out. Since I pride myself on admitting it when I’m wrong, I can admit that I was at least half wrong about that, at least as it pertained to the SEALs. As it pertained to the SEALs, the way the shooter tells it, the mission went down just as the movie depicted:

Everybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you’re going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that’s what we wanted to do.

Here’s a longer passage:

There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.
He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn’t appear to be hit. I can’t tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know.

For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That’s him, boom, done.
I thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn’t seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.

I’m just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He’s got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he’s famous for. And he’s moving forward. I don’t know if she’s got a vest and she’s being pushed to martyr them both. He’s got a gun within reach. He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won’t have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].

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It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?). But you invite that when your movie screams “THIS IS TRUE” at the beginning, like Zero Dark Thirty does in its opening “real events” title card. You can’t just forgive everything in the guise of “but it’s a movie!” when the movie is so clearly telling you that it’s fact. Thus, whether Zero Dark Thirty correctly depicts torture isn’t nitpicking, it’s relevant. So is it “pro-torture,” as John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and others have alleged? Mark Bowden, who wrote a book about the search for Bin Laden, says it’s not. Alex Gibney, who directed a movie about torture, doesn’t quite say Zero Dark Thirty is pro torture, but says it’s irresponsible.

To make a long story short and an answer predictable, they’re both right. Zero Dark Thirty is not immoral because it depicts torture as it was (something that happened, a context, a small part of the story but not a major player) without taking a particular stance. But it is a little amoral that it doesn’t seem to take any stance. It even omits key events to keep from having to. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with humans. It feels like an attempt to create suspense with no soul. Bowden’s rule of thumb for dramatizing a true story responsibly is that you can invent, but you have to “color inside the lines” of the truth. That is, you create fictions within the unknowns without altering the shape of the facts. Zero Dark Thirty mostly does that, but it also omits big chunks of them (we’ll get to that). Artistically, another problem is, who is Jessica Chastain’s character? I watched the whole movie and I still know nothing about her. Zero Dark Thirty invents a character with no apparent personality to tell a story the broad strokes of which we already know. How does that help? It even makes the movie dull at times, like a dry and talky procedural. The lady next to me was snoring loudly.

The Hurt Locker, for all the massive liberties it takes with actual military tactics, had a compelling protagonist and a clear perspective. “War is a drug.” What’s Zero Dark Thirty‘s perspective? Redheads are smart? Incorrectly or not, people jumped to “torture is good” because there’s a vacuum of anything else.

Gibney says ZDT is wrong because it doesn’t use its opportunity to argue against torture:

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures, it’s the first trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, starring Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Strong, and re-teaming the Hurt Locker’s writer-director team, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow (the latter of whom also directed Point Break – NEVER FORGET). The hunt-for-Bin-Laden subject matter is already pretty fresh in our minds, and the trailer doesn’t show much beyond b-roll and graphics, so it’s hard to know quite what we’re looking at just yet. But hopefully it adheres closely to the facts of the case, because that’s going to be the most gloriously anti-climactic villain death since Pan’s Labyrinth.

“We tracked the fugitive for more than 10 years! He was the most wanted man in the world! We weren’t even sure he was still alive until we caught a break – his driver! We followed him for months until he led us right to him!”

“WOW! And then what happened?? Did you have to foil a high-tech security system? Drill through the vault from underneath? Rappel from the ceiling by wires to avoid setting off the motion censors?”

“Nah, we just kicked down the front door and shot him in the face while he was sitting on the couch. Then we left.”

“Oh. ”

Cue right-wing pundits claiming this was carefully orchestrated by the liberal Hollywood conspiracy to coincide with the election in 5… 4… 3… 2…

(some folks told me the original banner pic was a little too risqué for work, but here it is)

Even if porn hadn’t been found inside Bin Laden’s compound, a Bin Laden porno would be inevitable.  The first law of porno is that if it exists, there will be porn about it.  The fact that there was already a #BinLadenPornTitles trending topic on Twitter just sped up the process.  Meanwhile, while researching this article, I discovered that Wicked Pictures produced a Nascar-themed porno called “ASSCAR.”  And that, in a nutshell, is what I love about porn.

Which is why I’m somewhat disappointed to report that the title of the Bin Laden porno Hustler is producing will be “This Ain’t Bin Laden XXX.”  Lame.  It’s redundant, of course it “ain’t Bin Laden,” he’s dead.  We want to watch a guy in a fake turban bang a runaway, we’re not illiterate.

The former al-Qaida leader was shot dead by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound in Pakistan earlier this month and now Hustler Video is set to lampoon bin Laden’s life in This Ain’t Bin Laden XXX.
After the feared terrorist was killed, operatives found a collection of porn magazines at his home.
A spokesman for Hustler Video jokes, “We’re pretty sure from what we’ve heard that bin Laden was a big fan of Hustler. He was looking at porn, now porn is looking at him. See, it all comes full circle.”
The DVD will hit stores this summer.  [Jam]

In fairness, they’re already up to “Shot in the Eyes” number 27, so that would’ve just been confusing.  I would’ve also accepted “Bin Laden: Buried in C.”

Here’s something interesting (and movie-related, thank God) to come out of Bin Laden-capped-in-the-face gate: apparently The Rock knew about it before the rest of us (Paul Walker might have too, but who knows what that guy’s ever thinking). As Devin Faraci over at BadassDigest discovered, The Rock tweeted this “teaser” at 7:24 pm LA time:

Meanwhile, the president’s announcement that Bin Laden was dead didn’t start until 7:30 – 7:45 pm Western time.  According to the thorough, minute-by-minute account in the New York Times, even the first rumblings online didn’t start until after The Rock’s tweet:

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