Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden (2012)

Absolutely Fantastic

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Horrible acting, almost completely fictitious, and unintentionally campy. They could have at very least got some believable people to play the seals. The actors playing the seals show zero concept of tactics and their acting sucks so bad it's insulting to the brave men of our special forces. I want my two hours back.

"The raid that supposedly led to Bin Laden's death has been shrouded in mystery for years. Speculation that the Obama administration may have embellished or outright lied about the true account of what happened has persisted, mainly because the White House has refused to publicly release images of Bin Laden's body. Although the White House said the corpse was immediately "buried at sea" in line with Islamic tradition, it quickly emerged that this was not standard practice. Numerous analysts have claimed that Bin Laden had in fact been dead for years and that the raid on his alleged compound in Pakistan was little more than a stunt. Other questions also persist, such as why the narrative and timeline of the raid has changed multiple times, why the White House initially claimed that "situation room" photos showed Obama watching the raid live when in fact there was a blackout on the live feed, and why neighbors in the immediate area surrounding the compound said with absolute certainty that they had never seen Bin Laden and that they knew of no evidence whatsoever to suggest he lived there."

It's ironic how much better this film was than the big box office film depicting the same story (Zero Dark Thirty). It actually had character development and didn't focus on one aspect of the story like the other film did. It was nice how they made an effort to make a story out of the Seal Team as well. Not to mention, their attention to detail when describing how they knew it was Osama Bin Laden in the fortress they discovered him in. Talking about how they incinerated trash, how the unusually tall male didn't do any of the household chores, they grew and raised their own food, etc. I have seen complaints about this film favoring Obama and his efforts in finding him but, is it not true that Obama made a huge effort to find him which other presidents didn't see as big of a project? I am not an Obama fan by any means but at least he did make finding him an emphasis of concern. Regardless of politics and negative reviews, Good Flick.

Having just seen Zero Dark Thirty in theaters I thought it would be entertaining to watch a more docudrama approach to the topic. Ironically the documentary part of this movie is the weakest part - the "interviews" are stilted and wooden and unconvincing. The rest of the movie is actually quite good. I enjoyed the training and preparation footage, the on-the-ground assets work, and the whole vaccination attempt. The actual mission could have been longer, with more suspense - as it was done, it was all rather matter of fact. There was additional detail (don't know if it's accurate) about what happened to the Pakistani air force and the story with locals on the ground.All in all, I enjoyed it and if you want to fill in some blanks on the Osama bin Laden it's worth watching.