Alex Gibney's harrowing HBO documentary The Forever Prisoner is infuriating

RogerEbert.com

"Gibney’s film proves to be a vital text in understanding the on-the-ground terror from the post-9/11 hunt for information and revenge, and the American barbarism that defines it," says Nick Allen. "It centers the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, as much as it can, even though he cannot be interviewed from his current cell on Guantanamo Bay; his presence is rather felt in the graphic hand drawings and brief entries about his experience. And in providing empathy to his torture as a human being, it also shows how America leaned on inefficient aggression and terror with methods that were proven not to be effective in acquiring information, while following half-baked leadership from key figures in the CIA. Gibney’s harrowing documentary provides that intimate scale, and allows us to then understand how this approach expanded until it hit the media spotlight with the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004."

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• The Forever Prisoner doesn't offer much that is new: "It’s difficult to get a good read on precisely the point being made by The Forever Prisoner... since most of its core contentions are common knowledge and/or generally accepted as fact, and its primary position—that (Abu) Zubaydah’s indefinite detainment is a fundamental and disgraceful wrong—turns out to be merely a footnote to its larger portrait," says Nick Schager. "As usual, (Alex) Gibney constructs his film with propulsive efficiency, providing succinct contextual background regarding the War on Terror, and a collection of talking-head commentators, textual evidence, and archival footage (as well as narration from himself) to forward his claims. What’s absent in his latest, however, is a compelling bombshell, or a more fully fleshed-out argument, to invest viewers in this trip back to the ugly early days of our post-9/11 history."
• The aspect that makes The Forever Prisoner least successful is maybe, simultaneously, the aspect that makes it most important: "Two questions ran through my mind throughout the two hours of Alex Gibney’s new HBO documentary The Forever Prisoner," says Daniel Fienberg. "The second, 'Wait, hasn’t Alex Gibney made this documentary before?' The answer to both questions is 'Kinda, but not exactly,' and it underlines how, when it comes to The Forever Prisoner, the aspect that makes it least successful is maybe, simultaneously, the aspect that makes it most important. Going back to Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure and through literally countless documentaries in between and adjacent, the story of our post-9/11 intelligence gathering — and what we’ve lost in American ideals by giving in to torture and abandoning notions of due process — has been chronicled repeatedly. Nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels all that revelatory, but the thing that’s essential in the doc is the reminder that for all of the story’s familiarity, it reflects a situation that has been barely ameliorated over more than a decade. There are still ideals that we’re failing to live up to, though I doubt that anybody who didn’t find that failure offensive before will bother watching The Forever Prisoner. And anybody who does watch may wonder about Gibney’s specific focus and the lack of forward-thing solutions in a documentary that feels, given its title, like 'time' should be a primary concern."
• Alex Gibney thrives on the oppositions between appalled talking heads explaining what went wrong and flashbacks to the smugly confident people doing the wrongdoing: "The Forever Prisoner tries to imprint upon us some sense of what America has lost since that time, and its attempts to impart a message of failed morality are impactful," says Roxana Hadadi. "Zubaydah, who Gibney describes as the “origin story of America’s failure of intelligence,” has become a ghost since his detainment, but Gibney lets him speak through excerpts from his journals, images of the drawings he sketched of the torture he endured, and recreated video footage of the EITs to which he was subjected. The CIA destroyed that evidence (and more), but Gibney puts a version of it back together and backs it up with interviews from Zubaydah’s civilian and military lawyers."
• Gibney discusses the lawsuits and CIA revelations that made The Forever Prisoner possible