So... y'all remember when this overrated trash came out and all the white feminists on here got mad if you didn't kiss Bigelow's ass and crown her the New Saviour of Female Directors in Hollywood or some shit. Well they better flex their fingers and polish their keyboards cos some major receipts are about to go down.
As we may all remember, Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal were actually working with the CIA during the development of the script. The CIA had a very big influence over the narrative of the film, and although Boal was allowed to keep some parts of the script in, 90% of the time he was pretty much the CIA's bitch and did whatever they were comfortable with. You can read more in depth about this here.
Well this pretty much sucks for Boal and the CIA since the recent torture report has revealed that the CIA LIED!!!!!! (shocker) about most of what went on during the hunt for Bin Laden, which obviously affected the plot of the film and how it depicted certain events.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report claims that, contrary to what the CIA and the film states, much of the most important information (ie about a Bin Laden courier named al-Kuwait) was obtained PRIOR to subjecting any detainees to 'enhanced interrogation techniques'.
It is true that most of the time, the audience is left to decide whether the torture was effective or not - but this very murkiness is what is so problematic about the film, as the report seems to be very clear about when the torture worked and when it didn't. Maya is shown as studying swollen, bloody faces of detainees who are implied to have been tortured in order to obtain information; eventually one of these detainees gives in and decides to talk, saying that he “has no desire to be tortured again.”
The Senate report however calls bullshit on this because the information that actually proved vital was obtained from an al Qaeda operative called Hassan Ghul, who reportedly sang like a canary and spilled his guts straight away. He even gave rough estimates as to where Bin Laden was living. When the CIA did use torture on him, he immediately shut down and began hallucinating and gave no more reliable info. This, according to the report, was not what the film showed.
For more information on this mess, please visit TIME magazine,the Business Insider, and TheHill.com.
I mean, what can you expect from a film that depicted Pakistan citizens speaking Arabic as opposed to Urdu or English, after all. Remember gals, if you want to make it like Bigelow did, work with corrupt institutions and piss off entire nations by depicting them in an ignorant/racist manner, and you'll be set on your way <3