I almost wish I hadn’t seen it.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s masterful movie about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, arrived in San Diego’s theaters on January 4 with more baggage than any film in recent memory. It was shown to critics in the beginning of December and they went on to give it award after award. Then various pundits and politicians saw it, and many of them claimed to be appalled by what they claimed was the film’s support for torture. Many of them were appalled, in fact, long before the saw it. Because political pundits have a great deal more power to define the national conversation than film critics do, many people had stark opinions, both political and aesthetic, about the film cemented into their brains by the time general audiences were allowed to see it, first in New York and Los Angeles, and now everywhere else. Continue…