I recall reading a memoir by one of the Navy SEALs that killed Osama Bin Laden concerning the substance of this movie. He was dismissive of the Hollywood depiction of the operation, but did say that the move accurately portrayed the CIA bitch-spook who led the quest to find and kill the architect of the 911 attacks with a rabid intensity.
The acting was all excellent. And the tension among operators was effectively maintained throughout the film. How accurate this movie was, I cannot know. I can tell you that it is not a jingoistic glorification of the secular crusade against Militant Islam. There are no ‘good guys’ in this film. The Islamists and the CIA people are all portrayed as evil obsession personified to such an extent that all acts are justified.
There is one scene where two female analysts, who believe they have set up a meeting with Osama Bin Laden’s doctor, talk the CIA paramilitaries into letting the subject drive through the gate and up to a group of seven CIA persons. The lead analyst is gleeful about the prospect that her geek internet search and viewing of brutal interrogations will soon result in bagging Bin Laden. Of course, the car is packed with C-4 and they are all turned into a shit stain in the desert. This scene still grips and disgusts me and also serves as a moral compass for this war, which is just getting under way, a war between girls and boys sitting behind computer screens and sending robots and super-soldiers out to kill, while the priests of the far more ancient materialistic cult they oppose send out their flesh-bots with bombs strapped to them in a brutal medieval parody of an airstrike.
Zero Dark Thirty does not, like Olympus Has Fallen, heroize torturers. Instead it paints a picture of two evil entities hunting each other’s meatpuppets across a largely neutral meatscape from the varied isolation of their medieval dungeons and capitalist towers.
While billed as the celebration of the “greatest manhunt in history,” I see Zero Dark Thirty’s sympathy for little CIA Maya, tear-streaked, brat-smirking angel of death to be the overture for a hundred years of soulless religious war, a century-long duel between the remote mass murderers of the feminists and patriarchs maniacally committed to advancing their competing globalist ideals.
It’s worth a view.
The war cannot last that long since the feminists and globalists will run out of women and male lackies to prosecute the war. I am close to people who pilot drones. Like you've said, they never argue the morality of anything beyond whether or not a statement leads to a generalization of a gender, a religion or ethnicity. Their lives are lived in corner cases as they are mostly walled off from the rest of their countrymen on military bases that are ethnically American. They have no kids nor do any of their peers who work in the 'military' or meaningless government law enforcement or intelligence analysis jobs.
Ultimately, the Moslems see their mission handed down from God, they have a lot of kids and like to fight, even if they are bad at fighting.
An interesting contrast to this movie is "American Sniper" where an American man with simple American "God, guns, and guts" values spends much of his life killing obviously bad mujahideen around Iraq only to be killed by another American stateside. The movie finished with me weeping. Clint Eastwood is a genius.
Supposedly historian Will Durant wrote that one of the sources of Assyria's decline was that its best men went to war and died and thus failed to have children. The same appears to be true of the West.
"...This scene still grips and disgusts me and also serves as a moral compass for this war, which is just getting under way, a war between girls and boys sitting behind computer screens and sending robots and super-soldiers out to kill, while the priests of the far more ancient materialistic cult they oppose send out their flesh-bots with bombs strapped to them in a brutal medieval parody of an airstrike..."
You really got to see this movie.
American Ultra 2015
It doesn't have good reviews but it's very much in the vein of the movie you watched. One thing I do believe is that your chowder headed silly White boys when ultimately faced with the final blood bath, after a brief period of slaughter, will ultimately harden up quite well. It's true the country is full of sissies and metrosexuals but we didn't get where we are being that way. It's still in us. A bunch of what makes people what they can be is genetic. It can be prodded different directions but the pan the batter is poured in is fixed. Under stress that which is baked in can come out.
I enjoyed watching the movie. It's somewhat stupid, as all movies are these days, but it has a deeper message underneath it.
To add another off topic. You might like this new armor used for full combat weapons with active sensors for scoring.
nextbigfuture.com/2016/04/sensors-in-body-armor-will-enable-safe.html
I don't know if this would be good or bad for training. It would allow full contact but might make you not fear edged weapons as much as you should. Mixed. I would bet you would be against it since you use wooden sticks to train. For most people it might be better to train with something more protective than not train at all.