Absolutely brilliant, the best movie I've seen from 2012 ...

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2013)

Usama bin Ladin dies at the end.
Picked up a high quality bootleg DVD awards screener down at the local bazaar today. If you take a few minutes to skim the reviews you see the range of emotion, political bias, and interpretations this movie has brought out. That in and of itself should tell you the subtle power of this film. From a business perspective, the amount of media attention this film has received for "inaccuracies" and the torture controversy, very little money invested in promotion was needed. You can't buy advertising like that.
Overall, an excellent collaboration. Jessica Chastain gives an Oscar worthy performance. She is the main vehicle for the narrative and the only character developed with a complete arc. A good decision by writer Mark Boal. Jason Clarke's character was a great contrast to Maya as well. Any other character development was unnecessary and not practical within a feature length movie on this topic. Two performance highlights for me from an extremely large cast; Mark Strong's scene after a disastrous attack on CIA agents in the field and James Gandolfini as CIA Director Leon Panetta. Lots of fresh faces and lessor known actors anchored by familiar ones. The expansive cast also helps to convey the amount of people who contributed to the largest manhunt in history.
Production Design was spot on and a little spooky at times. The Forward Operating Bases and locations in Afghanistan were very realistic. They even have Hesco barriers. The Cinematography of the actual raid was masterful. The POV style and night vision effects draws you into the climatic raid. The editing on the macro, scene to scene scale during the I and II Acts did seem a bit choppy at times due to the almost 10 year time frame covered. The III Act and the essentially real time raid more than make up for this. The tension and pacing builds slowly to a very satisfying emotional climax and was amazing considering everybody in the world with access to any form of media knows how the movie ends.
If you are looking for a less than two hour long patriotic action shoot'em up devoid of any intellectual stimulation or shades of gray moral ambiguity this is not the movie for you. This topic could have easily filled a 10 hour long HBO mini-series. The fact they were able to tell this story as they did in a two and a half hour feature length movie speaks volumes for the writer, director, and editor. And lets keep this in perspective, its a MOVIE people. Its not a book, its not journalism, and unless you were a participant in the raid or have the proper clearance and a need to know you do not know how accurate or factual it is. It took 9 years of painstaking, slow, boring, and methodical investigative work by many parties to find and kill this guy. The site exploitation (SE) of the computer room at the compound was emphasized. They found the mother lode of Al Queda intelligence on that compound in addition to the most wanted man in the world.
The only political references that I noticed on first viewing were a few references to the Iraq/WMD fabrication and a short TV clip in the background of one scene where President Obama is being interviewed about torture. If you come away from this movie thinking the director intended to show torture was necessary to find UBL you should learn more about film making and then need to watch the movie again. It does depict water boarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other controversial interrogation methods in some very intense scenes, but in now way justifies them or makes a moral judgment. That is left for the viewer to decide.