The National Geographic Channel may have won the race to be the first to portray the events that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden – beating Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty to the big screen by rushing to the small screen on Nov. 4 – but it’s still too soon to say if being the first is the same as being the best.
Nat Geo will air SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden on Sunday at 8 p.m. (and has opened in theaters internationally). The film comes from The Weinstein Company and is directed by John Stockwell (Into the Blue, Turistas, Crazy/Beautiful) and produced by Nicolas Chartier, who was a producer on The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s Academy Award-winning film.
Both SEAL Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty have been pre-emptively called enablers for President Obama, since the killing of Bin Laden was a major coup for him. But SEAL Team Six will come under more scrutiny because it will air two days before the election and then be available the next day on Netflix.
Still, it’s hard to imagine this film (or even the unseen, save for trailers, Zero Dark Thirty), moving the needle on an election. Why? Because everyone in the world knows what happened and how it ended. The whole thing is in the history books. And with the publication of No Easy Day from SEAL member Mark Owen, it’s not like the world lacks for details if they really want to seek them out.
And yet if any Republicans are worried this sneaky little move by Nat Geo and TWC be a knockout blow or even a jab in this upcoming election, they should rest easy. That’s because the film really isn’t that good…
Read more: The Hollywood Reporter
