Where ZDT fits is as the bookend to Lawrence of Arabia. Each movie deals with the West's involvement with Middle Eastern politics, one from the start in the 20th Century, the other for the 21st. Back then it's one British officer struggling through the desert, now it's batteries of U.S. soldiers flying in and out with impunity, but it both cases there's the sense of "other," that the West can never, no matter how embedded, truly understand or have a place in the desert worlds. The threats to Maya's life are essentially urban - an assassination attempt rather than dying of thirst - but there's watching still the lone figure coming from a great distance (a fateful car rather than Omar Sharif), the hero putting on the local headgear to operate in the area, the lonely military outposts in a hostile land.
The question isn't whether the movie endorses torture, it's "Where do you want to go?" which Chastain outed on The Daily Show as the existential last line of the movie. In Lawrence, a man is driven insane by his immersion into this Middle Eastern world. In ZDT it's a nation (with Maya as the metaphor). Lawrence posits that his Western influence helped create the desert nations. ZDT asks if and how we want to be engaged with these very same nations - if, in another twist on the same theme in Lawrence, there a brutalization like torture involved.
