Uthinkable
From Zanecorpwiki
Summary
At first, I thought this was a terrible movie going for cheap pandering. Then I thought it was one of the more serious and thoughtful movies I'd seen.
I don't think this is giving anything away, but the movie takes the the "what if a terrorist planted a suitcase bomb, would you use torture" trope that was thrown around with ridiculous abandon during the torture "debates" of 2007 through 2010.
There's nothing much realistic about the movie and that's entirely okay. The characters aren't people, they're representative. The movie isn't about entertaining, but about posing a series of questions, which it does with surprising clarity. Can torture be justified? How do you way value and lives? How do you weigh a definite life before you with millions of possible lives "out there"?
It's probably not a movie that many people would enjoy, and that's good because that isn't the point. It is a movie that many people should probably watch.
Details and Notes
Spoilers.
Since the movie is so bound up in the questions in poses, it's impossible to critique the movie without commenting on the those questions. Is torture justified? The movie talks a lot about "you despise this, but then you ask if it could work" and it neatly sidesteps the question of efficacy since the bomber may have planned to give up the information all along.
It reminds me of the scene from a few good men where Nicholson talks about "you don't like what I do, but you want me to do it". (Modern) liberals are just being smug when they say, "Well, I'd never torture someone" as if the choice was "torture or no torture" and the consequences of the information, the other side of the equation is blithely ignored. At the same time, (modern) conservatives are being hypocritical when they selectively apply their values only in situations where there is no cost.
At the end of the movie, the answer to all this was clear to me at least: we must avoid the question. We should focus on improving the lives of people so there's no impetus to radicalize. People riot when they are hungry. They destroy when they have nothing.
