Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden

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.

Don't expect a plot, storyline, character development or comedy. We all know what the story is. This is about how it was done.

This is a documentary that tells us what happened it great detail. We don't usually get access to how the CIA works and what they do exactly in normal times. After 9/11 weren't normal times with the threat of terrorism everywhere. HBO makes great documentaries with real facts. If you want to know more, it is worth it.

I went into this thinking this would be about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. What I found, was a story about women investigators talking about their struggle to work in a male dominated organization.

I only made it about a quarter of the way in before I couldn't take it anymore. I figured, surely it can't all be about this, and must get better eventually. But it didn't seem to be improving. Perhaps it does get better after the quarter mark. However, I don't have the parience or enough trust in it to find out.

This is an HBO documentary about the hunt and the killing of Osama Bin Laden by the Americans. It's great to see an inside look at the team that was tasked to hunt for Bin Laden. Certainly there's a sense that some parts are being left out or glossed over. It's hard to determine whether it's a matter of personal views or actual secrecy requirement. But overall it's important to see what actually happened. I found the interviews with many of the people involved very compelling. Sadly, some of the main people weren't there. One in particular was killed in Afghanistan.

I went into the theatre expecting this to be a more sober, objective and documentary- styled version of the events depicted in Zero Dark Thirty, but I was very much surprised by what I ended up seeing. The interview objects, or characters if you will, with very few exceptions all struck me as having frighteningly little ability to question the events they were at the centre of on any moral level. It's possible that this is of the director's doing, but regardless I left the theatre with the feeling that the film was mostly about people defending their reputation as good workers among their superiors and co- workers after an office quarrel, and not even remotely about the larger moral questions of what the military and intelligence bureaus are doing to human beings in other countries. I was extremely disappointed. To me this film appears pointless. And in the light of how important and complex the events it circles around are, crushingly so. I also left the theatre with an ominous feeling of that if the level of intelligence displayed in this film is representative for the people in charge of some of the most powerful organisations on earth, then we're all in trouble.