MovieChat Forums > Unthinkable (2010) Discussion > 12 Angry Torturers

12 Angry Torturers

posted 8 years ago by tomfrederick-65521
3 replies | jump to latest

I was excited to watch this film because it seemed to me to be a battle of wits and ideologies type storyline.

I didn't get very far in before I became disappointed. Now I enjoyed the Saw movies, and to a lesser extent Hostel and other torture films, they are the good vs evil rubbish which satisfies a basic instinct in many of us.

But this movie is different, it seeks to convince us that torture is sometimes the only way to do things.

We take a bunch of people with different ways of thinking, be they the FBI, military or regular people, and one by one, we get them to admit that torture is OK. By the end of the movie even our moral-compass-protagonist is pleading with the the 'interrogator' to be as extreme as possible.

What this movie wants us to believe is that all our left-wing talk amounts to nothing when the baddies are knocking on our door. Talking to the bomber resulted in us being drawn into his game and ultimately only committing the worst possible of atrocities was effective.

Then to add insult to injury, in the end the 4th bomb goes off anyway (or we are to assume so). What's the final message then? That they should have brought the kids back in and let Sammy J slice them up so that we would have known about the 4th bomb.

I see many threads on here supporting torture with the familiar 'What would you do if your family were tied up by a maniac/jihadi'. And I can see where they are coming from, if you make a scenario where torturing someone is the only route, then who could argue with torture right?

The problem here is threefold:

1. In real life torture is not saved for the extreme scenarios but used routinely, even if it is just the common old waterboarding that your granny did when you didn't eat your greens. This movie helps make that acceptable.

2. An intelligent and thoughtful interrogator will get information from someone if they are able to give it without resorting to torture, despite how impossible movies like this would have it seem.

3. How often in real life does one person and the knowledge in their heads present itself as the sole obstacle to anyone's goals? If investigations relied on guilty people confessing their crimes then our prisons would be spartan places.

[–] john_blanas 8 years ago

But this movie is different, it seeks to convince us that torture is sometimes the only way to do things.

evidently its not, because the bomb did go off

[–] tomfrederick-65521 8 years ago

The bomb did go off yes, why? Because the 'liberals' pussied out and would not let the torturer do what needed to be done and torture the children. Don't forget that the Sam Jackson character was sure that there was a fourth bomb, that the only way to get the terrorist to admit to it was to torture his children. But he wasn't allowed to, he wasn't allowed to do what needed to be done and so we all suffer.

[–] ikarimalice 7 years ago

1. Real life is irrelevant. The film raises the question of at which point or in what scenario is torture acceptable. Where or when it occurs in real life doesn't matter, and if it does exist like this, none of us could ever know whether or not it works, doesn't work, or has/has not worked.

2. No they wouldn't. The film depicts Muslim extremists as they present themselves in real life events. Radicalized martyrs who are prepared to die(usually by their own hand or bomb) for their cause. They aren't likely to ever talk based on being talked to or from minor and nonpainful techniques which again is the question the film asks.

3. That's also the point. The film is a hyperbole of this type of scenario. It's unlikely that we would catch one guy who filmed himself with a bomb and there was definitive and total proof. And I'd agree the film would have been better if it was at least a little more ambiguous in that regard. It'd be much more interesting if rather than the plot twist at the end involving a fourth bomb, the film just simply revealed whether or not he was even guilty. Or to be frustrating and completely ambiguous, it ends without getting information and before the timer goes off so you never know if he was or wasn't guilty. That'd be frustrating but at least it'd really hammer the focus on whether or not torture should be condoned if there's a very strong case against someone.