'Zero Dark Thirty' prompts call for boycott

Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty is garnering a lot of attention, especially for a film that hasn’t even been viewed by the public. But not all of the attention is positive.

Despite winning Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematographer from the New York Film Critics Circle, some people are calling for a boycott of the film.

Jesse Kornbluth, editor of HeadButler.com, is one of those people. But why?

“My reason is simple: The film glorifies torture,” Kornbluth wrote, according to The Huffington Post.

Bigelow’s film is about the chase and mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. The film shows uses of watetboarding and other forms of torture. Although Bigelow stresses that Zero Dark Thirty is not a documentary, she admitted to taking “almost a journalistic approach,” according to Slate.

However, the accuracy contributes to Kornbluth’s desire to boycott the film.

“But what if this film, which every critic I've read says is so brilliantly done it feels like completely authentic historical storytelling, comes to inspire completely authentic acts of terrorism?” he wrote. “What do we call the victims: collateral damage?”

Slate’s Dana Stevens argued that Zero Dark Thirty is “a vital, disturbing and necessary film precisely because it wades straight into the swamp of our national trauma about the war on terror and our prosecution of it, and no one—either on the screen or seated in front of it—comes out clean.”

Zero Dark Thirty hits select theaters Wednesday and is scheduled for complete release Jan. 11.