Saturday, January 26, 2013

The quest for Osama Bin Laden













When doing a fictional movie based on true events about the 9/11-aftermath you usually have to take sides. This movie tries to avoid it, but as it focuses on an American CIA agent it's kind of forced to take a side on the matter. However it's not a bad thing at all, covering all the sides to a complicated matter like this would make quite a dull movie to be honest. But enough of politics and on with the movie. It starts about 2 years after the 9/11, though the events of 9/11 are reminded at the beginning in a simple but surprisingly effective manner. The movie follows a CIA agent called Maya, played brilliantly by Jessica Chastain, on her seemingly impossible efforts to track down Osama Bin Laden. The movie picks out notable moments during the years most of you have probably read about in the newspapers and provides a sort of inside look on how things supposedly looked from the CIA's perspective. Not really any need to go into the plot any more than that as it's kind of self-explanatory what's going to happen, unless you spent 2011 in a closet without any form of communications. The style of the movie is a bit documentary like, sometimes combining news footage and surveillance tapes into the film. This does increase the feel of realism nicely and especially at the end when they go and get the guy those night vision shots almost puts you in there with the soldiers. This movie will surely divide opinions, mostly because of political viewpoints, so it's definitely kind of a provocation. But I'll look past that and I rate it as a quite a strong drama which it is with great performances from nearly all of the cast. There are some problems with it though, pretty much the whole first half of the movie is a bit dragging and kind of seeking a tone for the rest of the movie. Sure the first half also brings out some of the big questions in the movie, like where to draw the line in interrogations and what are people prepared to do when they believe in something strongly enough. But all of those we could have gotten in a lot shorter time as well, though once the movie finally gets going and the second half kicks in, it's quite brilliant. And just to point the obvious out, no it doesn't matter that you already know what's going to happen, so it's well worth watching.
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