Russian net trolls and bots hate it, so that tells you something

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2018)

Firstly for those saying Afghanistan is a failure, that is laughable. the point of the action in Afghanistan was to reduce state level support and host terrorist groups with large scale international reach capable of killing thousands of American civilians at a time. That has been 100% successful. Erecting nonsense, strawman goals like making Afghanistan some kind of fully stable modern democracy, or fully ending islamacism is not a serious arguing point, since this was never a goal.
Let's get to the film. If you know the book it has lots of license, and the film takes even more license: as do all war films. Is 12 strong as faithfully accurate on SO as Zero Dark Thirty? No.
As far as acting and character development, there are some problems. Interestingly the most talented actor, Michael Shannon does terribly here, really showing no resemblance to anything I have seen in the military, he can't even hold a firearm properly. But I see that as mostly a casting mistake.
Overall this is a very very well paced, well shot war film. It is not excessively jingoistic. That it celebrates some dramatic successes of the early SO operators, dropping into totally unknown territory, with little support, simply reflects the reality of the triumphs of our operators (although some credit should have been given to the spotters who also went in with the operators).