Just posted a semi-review over on Facebook. As it's not a proper review-review, and I'm not even fully sure how I feel about it yet, I'll put this here and look forward to the conversation.

---

No spoilers.

I'm actually oddly conflicted. I can see why everyone is impressed with this movie, it does a lot of things right and very few things wrong, and boy would this be an easy movie to get wrong. I did feel the propaganda a couple of times, but not as much as in virtually any other movie involving the military... and honestly, if any military-related movie was gonna have rah-rah U!S!A! propaganda, it'd be this one. Not so much. So we'll call that a wash.

My inclination is to call it a very good movie that I didn't enjoy too much. The approach they've taken here is to find some person who was there for a long time, but most importantly there at the end, and tell -their- story, giving us a framework to follow for years before the climax happens. I think this was the right call. Unless you wanna tell parallel stories about every person or department involved in eventually tracking down UBL, finding one person who can do a lot of that for you is economical storytelling.

However, that exact good call is what gives me pause about the movie as a whole. The most obvious red flag is the much-discussed "this movie implies torture got us the right information, which is a dubious claim" issue. The lady this film focuses on saw torture happen repeatedly, and saw it garner information, and eventually used information to find UBL, and eventually helped them get him. Clearly this lady is not the whole story, and what she saw seems like a string of causal developments, but right off the bat the "focusing on one person" framework is a bit wobbly because her (surely true-to-her) version of the events is limited. Ad hoc ergo propter hoc. In its defense, the film opens with an unusual title card; not "this film is based on a true story," but "this film is based on first-hand accounts of true events."

Alrighty. Setting aside reality for a while, which I can't speak to anyway, did I enjoy the film itself?

Well, that's the less-obvious red flag with the one-person's-story framework. Since we're following one character's journey the whole time, my... desire... would be to have enjoyed that character more. The lady in the film isn't unsympathetic or anything, but the emotional spectrum (I'll forgive the lack of an emotional arc, because, you know, real life) felt awfully muted to me. This lady sees some very serious, very personal shit a couple times in the film, and I never really felt them affecting her the way they probably would have. (And probably did.) I'm fairly sure her peak emotional watermark in this film is "VERY annoyed," where it seems like she should have been totally devastated at least once. (Where and why is a spoiler.) Her feeling of duty, her obsession, her stoicism, these things all ring true, but we don't see much more from her. There's not a lot of humanity there. Without sacrificing any amount of reality, the film could have done more to make me root for her. As it stands, I feel like I was mostly rooting for her out of politeness and reverence to the subject matter.

There's much, much more to say about the film, but I want to digest it for a while and figure out how I feel. The bottom line is, with the above paragraph, we've outlined the nature of my first experience with the movie: not particularly engaged. Which is unusual, because as we all know, this is a story that defines the last ten years of a complex national narrative. We all care. I've even read one of the books by a SEAL Team 6 member, because I was so interested. Alas, I (and apparently just me, on this one) found the film to be a technically impressive, oddly bloodless, piece of Oscar-bait.

I visit Holden and attend his New Years party every year. Indiana is fucking ridiculous when it comes to weather, and the 12 inches of snow since I've gotten here is a bit much, but it serves at least one good party purpose.

Look how proud he is. Aw. Look at his stupid face.