Like Bigelow's Hurt Locker in quality and excess hype

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2013)

As with her first film Hurt Locker, Bigelow has managed to accomplish far more in film PR than in the films. Both I end up rating 65 of 100. They both have moments and are worth seeing, but far from being great or Oscar/Academy worthy films.
It fulfills the basic aspects of an intelligence action/suspense film and is interesting and entertaining in that respect, far more so than the last 007 film Skyfall.
This film is more of a recount of a history timeline with dramatic filler. It, like Hurt Locker, feels almost like a military propaganda film. Far more interesting and historically significant after Osama's discovery and killing is Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden (done in 2008), which was ahead of the military/CIA by 3 years in tracking Osama's location. Strange there's no reference to that actual documentary anywhere in this.
While the film claims to be made on "first-hand" accounts, it's mostly first-hand public accounts rather than Wikileaks/whistle blower accounts. While that make it seem more real, and some publicly known information definitely deserves repeating and more than a couple minutes of time in the news, it limits the film to the conventional. In addition, first-hand accounts don't mean true. If not verified or given broader context, they're like listening to any other story. Bush & Cheney could give you a "first-hand account", but that doesn't make it accurate or worth listening to.
Contrary to criticism, there's no endorsement of torture. If anything, it reinforces "enhanced interrogation" is actually torture. It also ties together a massive failure with torture-based intelligence.