What Effect Will 'Zero Dark Thirty' Have on America?

I expected to be upset by Zero Dark Thirty, after reading Glenn Greenwald's complaints about how the movie promoted the false idea that torture was instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden.  However, the film did not strike me as something that glorified, or ever justified, torture.  My impression was that the world depicted in the film was dark, sad, and hopeless.  This actually makes me hopeful that others will get this impression and decide to move this country in a different direction.

The movie's main character, a CIA analyst named Mya, looks like a deer caught in the headlights for most of the film.  In fact, many of the characters give that impression.  They find themselves in a violent world where everyone hates them and they can't stop the slaughter of terrorism no matter how many detainees they torture or how many billions they spend.  They are the security troops of the most powerful empire on earth, yet they feel helpless.

The climax that the movie builds to, the raid on bin Laden's compound, was really quite anti-climactic.  It's not a glamorous gun battle.  It's just a bunch of armed thugs methodically breaking into a house with explosives and shooting everyone who moves.  Well, they spare the children, condemning them only to a life of fear and hatred by shooting their parents and then trying to assure them "it's all right".  Yes, I just shot your mother, but it's all right, we're the good guys.  It wasn't pretty or glorious.  We didn't even "bring him to justice", putting him on trial to showcase how our civilization is superior with our rule of law.  We just killed him.  Osama bin Laden directed the killing of 3000 citizens, but we got him back.  We had to spend a trillion dollars and kill 100,000 innocents along the way, but we got our revenge.

That's the America Zero Dark Thirty depicts: a sad, vengeful group of rich bullies that everyone hates.  We used to send astronauts to the moon, and invent things like integrated circuits.  Now the greatest feat this America can accomplish is killing an old man in his home.  I'm glad the movie came out now, nearly two years after bin Laden's death.  This way, people can see the hollowness of Mya's claim that getting bin Laden matters.  Perhaps he was, as she claimed, continuing to direct attacks against America.  But since the War on Terror shows no signs of abating or even slowing down as a result of his death, perhaps people will realize that we need a plan for interacting with the world that goes beyond getting everyone to like us by killing every last person who hates us.  It should go without saying that you can't slaughter your way into people's hearts, but that's literally our strategy.  Perhaps the unglamorous despair of Zero Dark Thirty will help wake up America's citizens to the sad, ongoing trauma that they've allowed their government to inflict upon the world.