Best movie of this year hands down!

As Good As It Gets

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I love this film, I can't remember how many times I've already seen it. I love Maya, the lead character of this film, based on a true CIA operative whose job is to locate UBL ( Usama Bin Laden).It took years and years of looking for the "proverbial needle in the haystack", and yet her conviction and determination, along with her colleagues, never waned on finding the the most wanted man on earth.Until she finally found the man and nobody believed her.

As someone who was working (and lived) in lower Manhattan, I have a different viewpoint for this film, just as all people who were living in NYC do when the WTC was destroyed. Everything was much more palpable. As thousands of other people did, I lost a very close friend (an FDNY Captain) who was inside Tower 1. As far as the film goes, I have no thoughts as far as morality and torture issues are depicted. We all know anything just about anything (within reason) would be done to capture and/or kill bin Laden. I do care about the quality of the film goes, as I am a very big fan of Kathryn Bigelow and Jessica Chastain. Unfortunately, I got very tired of seeing Maya write down how many days had gone by, over and over, ad infinitum. I believe many people were miscast. Also, for some reason I cannot really point to, the film just didn't do much for me. Perhaps I was sick of hearing about it., having lived through so much of it, so close to my heart.Other than what I already mentioned, what I remember the most is the burnt plastic smell which permeated lower Manhattan for weeks, and numerous other seemingly innocuous things that only residents who were there can relate to.BTW, bin Laden was killed on my birthday.

An interesting movie with some good scenes, but isn't too spectacular. Sicario is pretty much just the better version of this movie.

I've lived in the Muslim world for years and in Pakistan for a few months. Now some friends came to stay and the one place they decided they HAD to see was the empty plot of land where once stood Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. Three hours to go, three hours back, some pictures and a story to tell (the movie says the city is 45 minutes drive from Islamabad, but that was back in 2010 - not now!).Once we came back we were so involved with the story of the raid that we had to see Zero Dark Thirty (for the 2nd time for me, 1st for them). The killing of UBL is meticulously reconstructed, but only covers the last 30 minutes of the movie. Most of the story involves a CIA semi-fictional agent who by sheer determination and luck convinces the Agency that Bin Laden can be reached, and that they have a good idea of what men is the key to his whereabouts: Ibrahim Sayed, AKA Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti. Information from detainees suggests Sayed is UBL's courier. Our hero figures that, wherever in Central Asia UBL is, the one thing he is sure to have is a courier. Track him, you get the big Kahuna.The Agency is initially unlucky to believe erroneous intelligence saying Sayed is dead. And then they are lucky to find out he is not dead. With a lot of push from our hero, they allot the resources to find him. It is no easy task. That's my favorite part of the movie. Surveillance technology can find out from where he is calling his family (busy districts in the Punjab), but it is a lot more tricky to follow him in the middle of the crowd to the place where he lives.After tracking Sayed to a VERY suspicious compound in a city the CIA never expected Bin Laden to be, it is time to decide if this is really UBL's residence. But the mysterious inhabitant never shows his face. I don't think he was hiding from CIA cameras, he just knows he is so recognizable. So the decision is left to the higher-ups, to bomb the place, raid it, or just keep waiting for more definitive intel. And that is the part where the Director has to make a dramatic decision. Does she show the President and his top aides deliberating? I think putting Obama, Clinton and Biden in the movie would suck all the air out of the room to the detriment of the focus on the field agents. Leon Panneta shows up, but he is not even named. The final act wrote itself, because it is a documentary-like recreation of the raid.Some reviewers pointed glaring mistakes: the Pakistanis seem to be speaking Arabic instead of Urdu. One part I had to laugh was when a mob stood outside the American Embassy in Islamabad. If you have been there, or anywhere in the diplomatic compound, you know it would never happen.It is hard to make suspenseful a story that unfolds throughout 10 years and involves meticulous collection of intelligence and a lot of false starts. So the movie may feel like a "boring procedural" for people who are expecting normal Hollywood fare. In order to add a personal touch to the main character, she has a fried killed in a highly implausible scene. Otherwise, Maya just remains a stock character you have to fill in the gaps: lonely woman married to her job, always having to prove herself, obsessed with a task her superiors don't want to give priority.Some people pointed out to a big lie of the movie: that torture gave crucial information. I'd point out that it is just a half-lie. Yes, nobody gave useful intel for the killing of UBL under torture. However, keeping terror suspects for years under dubious legal status (say with me - Guantanamo!) paid dividends.