Revisado por UncleLongHair2

I saw this on HBO recently. It is a great counter-point to "Zero Dark Thirty" which, it is now even more clear, summarized and dramatized the work of a group of CIA analysts that spans many decades. The character "Maya" from Zero Dark Thirty is shown as a young analyst obsessed with catching OBL. The truth is that there were a group of analysts, mostly women, who were all collectively obsessed with catching him, and their work spanned a time frame much longer than many know, going back around 10 years before most of the public had ever heard of OBL.

This movie sheds more light on what goes on behind the scenes and (without revealing any secrets or classified information) how analysts collect and organize the blizzard of seemingly unrelated data to draw conclusions and direct agents in the field. It is hard to imagine working on such an unbounded, complex problem for 10, 20 or even 30 years without reaching the goal, and then to finally and suddenly get there. It makes it clear that the credit for stopping OBL goes far beyond one analyst, one special forces operative, or one president, and is the culmination of dozens of person-years of hard work.

I found the interviews to be very candid, much more so than I expected, and they touch on subjects such as how information is relayed between analysts and agents "downrange", how analysts can get comfortable with the idea of hunting people down and killing them, and whether or not "extreme interrogation techniques" are useful or morally acceptable. The CIA can have an image of being bureaucratic, incompetent, and occasionally brutal and arbitrary. However, the people interviewed come across as passionate about their work, dedicated, empathetic, and extremely human despite the intense jobs they have.

Rather than just have people talk into the camera, the producers spiced things up with scenes of analyst whiteboards, connect-the-dots type animations, eerie footage of battlefields and locations in the middle east, dramatic but staged scenes of analysts talking while driving through well-known DC area locations, etc. This is primarily just eye candy but serves to move the narrative along and give you something to look at while they unveil the story. I didn't find this distracting but I can see how some people would.

Overall well worth watching if you are interested in the subject and are open to a relatively favorable view of the CIA and its employees.