In shocking news, Zero Dark Thirty is bullshit

Brace yourselves: it turns out that Zero Dark Thirty, which previously was a clean as clean can be, has been revealed to be a piece of CIA propaganda. Who could have known? Great work by Adrian Chen, as usual.

Now, in the comments of that piece, what I presume will be the popular defense of the film is already being waged: hey, the changes were small potatoes, so what? Well "so what" is that as long as a governmental body is applying pressure to a filmmaker and receiving changes in response to that pressure, it's a corrupted act of propaganda, no matter how light the changes. You cannot simultaneously say to have produced a journalistic work, in the mold of a documentary— the explicit claim of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal while doing the initial promotion of the movie— while a clandestine agency dictates what you portray.

And in any event, the most chilling and disqualifying aspect of that declassified report is that the CIA pronounced itself "absolutely comfortable" with Zero Dark Thirty. Here's a pro tip: if you're making a movie about one of the most controversial series of events in American history, and a government agency that has been repeatedly accused of breaking the law during those events pronounces itself "absolutely comfortable" with the results, you're not making a movie. You're producing propaganda.