Catherine Bigelow's "Kill Osama"
Published in The Badger, Film Page, ed. Lucy Atkinson & Lily Rae
Wordcount: 591
Date of Publication: May 2011
On the morning of May 2nd those of us who do not suffer from news and social networking addiction, insomnia or terrifying nightmares, woke up to the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead. If you were watching Fox News there may have been some amusing confusion, but the basic report was that the al-Qaeda leader and mind behind the 9-11 attacks had been shot dead in the authorised “Operation Neptune Spear” by a team of 24 American Navy Seals. But that much, you know.
This breaking news, interestingly, coincided with the leak of gossip surrounding director Kathryn Bigelow's latest and almost prophetic project, a film with the tentative title Kill Bin Laden. From the same writing team that brought us Bigelow's Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, the film was set to detail a failed black-ops attempt to hunt and kill the fugitive Bin Laden on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Talks of the films cancellation have been quelled and production is set to go ahead this summer, with Australian actor John Edgerton all but confirmed for the lead, replacing front runner Michael Fassbender. However the question that has been floating around the cyber highway since the leak, is the extent to which Bigelow’s original vision will be mutated by the explosive events of Bin Laden's recent death.
For me, the only real interest that this film actually piques is the speculation on what kind of critical stance Bigelow - who has proved herself capable of rational thought in the past - is likely to take in her presentation of the assassination, which is now rumoured to preoccupy the last 40 minutes of the feature. If this is to become a “truth” piece, then the facts, even when recited by Barack “no American's were harmed in this production” Obama, are tenuous at best. What Bigelow actually has to work with is a distinct lack of evidence, a shoddily put together story, an unseen body buried at sea and the Trumpian harangues of “Pictures or it didn't happen.”
An interesting angle for Bigelow might be to actually incorporate this ambiguity into the plot of the film rather than making what may have been a project brimming with potential into, simply, another propaganda biopic that unselfconsciously present itself as sterling fact. I mean conspiracy aside, even if we take what we have been told at face value there is still an awful lot to be critical of in the Americans' execution. And even leaving the actual operation to one side, the fact that the most powerful man in the world sauntered onto the international stage on May 2nd to celebrate the death of any single human being, regardless of his crimes, without international trial is travesty enough for the greatest tragic film of our time if handled with any amount of balls. If we can celebrate anything about the film industry, after all, even the American one at that, it is the space made available for dissenting voices, and the freedom that this execution affords to film makers.
But this is an optimistic hope, I think, for Bigelow, and there is the far more likely prediction that this will merely turn into another celebration piece; The figurative icing on the cake that was the carousaling of breached international law in the form of an American Party-Like-Its-1999. Only time will tell, and in any case the film is suited to its director who at least stylistically handles the thriller genre with a delightful finesse and lack of heavy-handedness.
Wordcount: 591
Date of Publication: May 2011
On the morning of May 2nd those of us who do not suffer from news and social networking addiction, insomnia or terrifying nightmares, woke up to the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead. If you were watching Fox News there may have been some amusing confusion, but the basic report was that the al-Qaeda leader and mind behind the 9-11 attacks had been shot dead in the authorised “Operation Neptune Spear” by a team of 24 American Navy Seals. But that much, you know.
This breaking news, interestingly, coincided with the leak of gossip surrounding director Kathryn Bigelow's latest and almost prophetic project, a film with the tentative title Kill Bin Laden. From the same writing team that brought us Bigelow's Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, the film was set to detail a failed black-ops attempt to hunt and kill the fugitive Bin Laden on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Talks of the films cancellation have been quelled and production is set to go ahead this summer, with Australian actor John Edgerton all but confirmed for the lead, replacing front runner Michael Fassbender. However the question that has been floating around the cyber highway since the leak, is the extent to which Bigelow’s original vision will be mutated by the explosive events of Bin Laden's recent death.
For me, the only real interest that this film actually piques is the speculation on what kind of critical stance Bigelow - who has proved herself capable of rational thought in the past - is likely to take in her presentation of the assassination, which is now rumoured to preoccupy the last 40 minutes of the feature. If this is to become a “truth” piece, then the facts, even when recited by Barack “no American's were harmed in this production” Obama, are tenuous at best. What Bigelow actually has to work with is a distinct lack of evidence, a shoddily put together story, an unseen body buried at sea and the Trumpian harangues of “Pictures or it didn't happen.”
An interesting angle for Bigelow might be to actually incorporate this ambiguity into the plot of the film rather than making what may have been a project brimming with potential into, simply, another propaganda biopic that unselfconsciously present itself as sterling fact. I mean conspiracy aside, even if we take what we have been told at face value there is still an awful lot to be critical of in the Americans' execution. And even leaving the actual operation to one side, the fact that the most powerful man in the world sauntered onto the international stage on May 2nd to celebrate the death of any single human being, regardless of his crimes, without international trial is travesty enough for the greatest tragic film of our time if handled with any amount of balls. If we can celebrate anything about the film industry, after all, even the American one at that, it is the space made available for dissenting voices, and the freedom that this execution affords to film makers.
But this is an optimistic hope, I think, for Bigelow, and there is the far more likely prediction that this will merely turn into another celebration piece; The figurative icing on the cake that was the carousaling of breached international law in the form of an American Party-Like-Its-1999. Only time will tell, and in any case the film is suited to its director who at least stylistically handles the thriller genre with a delightful finesse and lack of heavy-handedness.
