Fascinating, insightful and straight from the actual players mouths
I have reviewed both Bin Laden flicks from last year. Geronimo and Zero Dark Thirty and I loved the last ten minutes of the former and while the latter was a solid movie it was unbelievably overrated. I have reviewed hundreds of movies so I look at what the critics say about films I might be interested in and I think it was ‘The Godfather’ that was by far the highest I had seen the critics score because most people loved the movie but when I saw the scores for Kathryn Bigelow’s rush job Zero Dark Thirty were all 100/100! I genuinely thought it was a mistake. Never in the history of films on IMDb has a movie been thought of as 100% perfect in everything. Not one iota of the film had anything wrong with it “allegedly.” Rant over. This was a documentary I found as interesting, factually, as Zero Dark Thirty but it went a lot further with the facts because there was obviously more time to spend on the analytics of the Bin Laden hunt.
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Director Greg Barker’s previous Documentary ‘Koran by Heart’ had slight hints of Muslim Extremism so he wasn’t completely on unknown territory. He did a pretty decent job with this however it felt a bit uneven as the difference in styles between the studio interviews and the “dramatizations” did not match up, in fact, it almost felt like two directors made it and not just one. Even so, I enjoyed it from start to finish and found it all fascinating. We get to meet the real players who were in from the start back in the nineties, working in silence with no one taking them as seriously as they should have been.
Bin Laden had caught the CIA’s attention in the late eighties so he didn’t quite appear from nowhere and it’s very apparent that Bin Laden’s high intelligence and long range planning were something that the Muslim Extremists had never had before, a true Extremist Terrorist leader. It’s weird but Bin Laden would probably have made a great businessman or a legitimate political leader but he chose to cause havoc and he then tried to pick on the wrong guys, and lost.
Highly Recommended
Score: B+
Review by Ed Blackadder, Lead Entertainment Writer
