Poor writing. Requires too much suspension of disbelief to pretend it is real...and slow

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2013)

If this movie had been entirely fictional, I would have given it 2 stars. The importance of the story and the care taken in some parts gave it 5.
Before I excoriate, here are the good points. It tells a very important story. Our country was spending soldiers' blood and sanity and HUGE amounts of money. Getting UBL made it easier to stop. Even if he had become less relevant to Al-Qaeda as the Pakistan station chief said in the movie, he still was important to many voters.
The movie used real names and stories of persons of interest to the analysts.
The movie shows how nasty the relatively low key torture techniques that were used in the US's name are. I have no idea how realistic they were, but certainly it was not fun to watch. Hopefully it gives the viewer some sense of what they are approving or disapproving when they express their views to their elected representatives.
The raid was depicted realistically, though I am no expert. It was quiet; the soldiers weren't jumping around yelling "Hooyah" during the operation. The children and women in the house were upset and terrified and pitiable. Things went wrong and the soldiers needed workarounds. The writing did not put the analyst physically present at the raid just to add drama ( I have no doubt that was discussed and rejected.) The only complaint I have is the man who killed UBL went into a shell shocked daze afterward. I suspect after all that training, those men are VERY professional and would be working quickly and with focus to get the job done and get out.
Now the criticism: A few more subtitles and back story explanations of names when they were used, would make easier for westerners to follow the interesting paths of reasoning the analysts were following. Would have kept the brain engaged a bit more.
The movie ends up being rather slow...seriously. A few people in my row were nodding and one woman two seats down was sleeping through almost the entire movie. (Maybe she had a rough night. . . )
Would have been nice to see some more character development. Except for a few pairings, you could hardly tell from one scene to the next how two people would interact. One scene professional, one scene companionable, the next screaming and the next compassion, with no explanation of the shifts. Huh? Maybe a little more time with the character's back stories or seeing them interact in different ways would have smoothed this out.
When a movie pretends to be documenting real events, even if embellished for dramatic effect, it makes operation of suspension of disbelief more difficult for me. The depicted behavior of the civilian intelligence analysts was often amazingly unprofessional, ignorant of very basic security practices and inconsistent and that pulled me out of the story.
Examples: Maya is meeting a colleague for dinner at a Marriott. She floats the name of the person they are hunting for across a table in an insecure environment where anyone could hear! I hope real analysts operate with a bit more discretion when they are away from the ID badges and pass code protected doors and computer systems.
Later in the movie after the bombing at the Marriott, Maya is invited out to eat and says "I don't eat out...too dangerous." Later, she is seen half intoxicated at a bar when a colleague delivers a rather important piece of intelligence equipment to her (which we never see ir hear about again).
A senior CIA officer screams at his team during a meeting. Nothing more constructive was communicated than "Please get me some answers" except with no "please" and lots of histrionics. Not exactly effective leadership. Really? With all the stress in the lives of folks in the field already, it is hard to imagine any high level worker lasting very long in that position with that sort of behavior. The team would self destruct around him.
Maya, shrieks at her boss in a hallway in a way that would make anyone question her stability. Very unprofessional. Unstable people don't work in classified environments very long.
Maya, in a high level meeting with the CIA director, blurts out irrelevant-to-the-discussion-data just to get some attention. (Paraphrase: "the house is 4021 feet away, eight tenths of miles, not one mile") This is 10 years into her character's career! A "I have nothing important to say, but pay attention to me" meeting strategy is discarded rather quickly after a little experience in the real world. . .or folks who use it find themselves in quiet positions pretty quickly where they won't distract from the core discussions and waste people's time. Surely the writer could have had her say something that was actually important to the discussion that no one else could have known?
Multiple classified conversations between CIA folks on *cell phones* ?? What are they even doing with cell phones in a secure area?
I was a tad disturbed that real suicide attack stories where real people died were doctored up to make them apply more directly to the characters in the movie. I am thinking in particular about the Chapman attack. A 45 year old mother of three was killed for real, but she wasn't an analyst out of Pakistan at the time, and her name was not Jessica.
Check out the wiki article on the Camp Chapman attack in 2009 and read the section on contractor and CIA casualties.
I have to give the writer that leeway to turn a complete snoozer into something with a little excitement, but this seemed disrespectful.
In short too unrealistic to feel like a true to life story, and too slow to enjoy like a piece of fiction.