Snuck away last night after the little gal went to bed to catch this one by myself. I thought it was very well done. Found a way of holding to a reasonably accurate narrative while being provocative at the same time, not always an easy feat - though the subject material helps them with this. I just really liked how they captured the story. The story was told within the frame of reference of the agents on the ground or in the data. The complaints of the folks that say the movie is pro-torture miss this point entirely. I do almost feel that they may have went out of their way to address the too-pro-Obama worries. For example, the only discussions at the White House were had with a layer between the President and the CIA - when that isn't accurate...many of the final planning sessions were conducted in the situation room with the President present. Anyone else seen it yet?
Good movie, the cia perspective is interesting although liberties were taken with interrogations. I also enjoyed the nat geo special.
Fair enough. By that, I mean the movie followed what is publicly (and likely had a nudge here and there about things that weren't quite as known - for example, CIA basically built the Maya image for them) known about the sequence of events, general players, chain of events, and the final operation. I've read a handful of books about the hunt and raid so I have a chain of events and "facts" in my mind - how accurate those are is a reasonable point of debate. Known details were wrong here and there. But that's why I said narrative. The primary figure who was interrogated at the beginning of the movie was a fictional figure, serving to represent several actual figures in the war on terror who aided in identifying the courier. The main female character in the Camp Chapman attack was melded into a co-worker of "Maya's" in Pakistan to provide that connection - I don't know if they called her Jennifer in the movie, but the historical figure that was connected to was Jennifer Matthews and there were certainly liberties taken there about Matthews' career progression as best as I could tell. Obviously Maya was a creation to tell the story, but was based on the female who briefed the special forces soldiers going into the raid. The walk throughs using the model of the compound were conducted in the situation room with the President, but were shown with Panetta at Langley instead. In the raid, the movie seemed to suggest three modified Blackhawks were used, rather than 2 modified Blackhawks and 2 chinooks. I'm sure there are seemingly countless other details that were wrong either intentionally or as oversight ... but I found it the movie to do quite a good job of not stomping all over the presentation of the general events as I understand them.
I also meant to add that the some pieces were obviously not accurate - but couldn't be...such as the scene where the connection is drawn between Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed.
