Jim Clemente, TV writer for “Criminal Minds” and a former FBI supervisory special agent, and Alison Bailes, film critic for More Magazine, join John Fugelsang on “Viewpoint” to consider whether Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated film “Zero Dark Thirty” is pro-torture given its depiction of the events leading to the death of Osama bin Laden.
“I think, in general, it does in fact say that torture actually worked. And that’s incorrect,” Clemente says.
“I don’t feel like the film is pro-torture, though, which a lot of people are saying it is. Anyone sitting through that film, you cannot come out of it and say torture’s a good thing — you’d have to be a sadistic lunatic to think that,” Bailes says. “This is a film that condenses 10 years into two-and-a-half hours, so clearly, characters are conflated, information is condensed. So I think that we have to look at this as a cinematic piece of art rather than a documentary piece of fact.”
