A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2012 Columbia Pictures Zero Dark Thirty,  director Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial 2012 thriller, is a riveting account of the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden and the May 1, 2011 raid that killed him. Because the outcome of SEAL Team Six’s mission is well-known,  Zero Dark Thirty  isn’t a typical spy tale where the ending is kept under wraps. Instead, it’s a tribute to the intelligence agents and military personnel who spent a decade tracking Al Qaeda’s elusive leader.     Zero Dark Thirty  is also a good example of what happens when a script begins to tell one story and, by twists of fate, ends up telling a different one. In the case of  Zero Dark Thirty,  screenwriter/producer Mark Boal was working on a script about bin Laden’s escape from U.S. and allied forces after the Battle of Tora Bora. Boal and Bigelow (who had collaborated on 2009’s  The Hurt Locker ) intended to make a movie about the CIA’s  failure  to...

The Hurt Locker (2009) There is, apparently, a simple rule-of-thumb (at least for those folks who keep track of these things) that war movies, no matter how well-made they may be, simply do not attract huge audiences to theaters in times of war. Certainly, people who are old enough to remember World War II and its immediate aftermath can make a good case that this is not always the case and that many of them, whether they were adults or kids at the time, watched movies such as  Air Force, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, Sahara, The Flying Tigers  and  A Walk in the Sun , not to mention the various newsreels and government-produced propaganda films. That having been said, movies about America's post-World War II conflicts made while the bullets were flying and the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Air Force personnel were in harm's way often flopped or were less-than-critically acclaimed.  (John Wayne's  The Green Berets  may be liked b...