Blu-Ray Review: Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden

There's a company called The Asylum which specializes in direct-to-video knockoffs of Hollywood blockbusters with titles like Transmorphers and Snakes on a Train.

With Zero Dark Thirty in theatres (and nominated for several Academy Awards), you can be forgiven for assuming that Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden is another low-budget "mockbuster" meant to piggyback on the hype surrounding Kathryn Bigelow's retelling of the daring mission to capture or kill the world's most wanted man  (The Blu-Ray case points out that it comes from "Producers of The Hurt Locker," Bigelow's previous film).

seal team sixActually, Seal Team Six aired on the National Geographic Channel before Zero Dark Thirty was released - just a few days before the 2012 Presidential election, in fact.  Opening-credits footage of Mitt Romney declaring that he wouldn't "move heaven and earth to get one man" is probably no accident, considering the involvement of Obama backers Harvey Weinstein.

The resulting film, helmed by actor-turned-director John Stockwell (Blue Crush) is a reasonably entertaining action film which probably didn't worry Kathryn Bigelow too much.  While a debate over the authenticity of Zero Dark Thirty rages on, Seal Team Six is a fictionalized account based on the still-murky details of the raid that finally caught and killed the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

That's why the framing device - "interviews" with members of the Navy SEAL team and the CIA analyst behind the raid - is so odd.  These are fictional characters, not actors playing the actual people involved, rendering the entire exercise kind of pointless.  

The same goes for occasional attempts to clearinly define the members of Team Six by showing them talking to their families over Skype or, in one truly bizarre scene, getting into a fistfight (To be fair, a moment where some of the team members talk about where they were on September 11, 2001, is more effective, mainly because I'll never forget where I was that horrible day).

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Article Author: Damian Penny

Damian J. Penny, originally from Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, is a lawyer in Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada. He blogs at DamianPenny.com.

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