Before all the controversy over No Easy Day and Zero Dark Thirty, there was Lone Survivor. A #1 New York Times bestseller back in 2007, Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s memoir about a failed 2005 mission in Afghanistan to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah is finally coming to the big screen this fall.
Directed by Battleship and Friday Night Lights filmmaker Peter Berg, the movie stars Mark Wahlberg as Luttrell and features Eric Bana, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster as his fellow SEALs. +Continue Reading
OK, here’s one for all our readers who say they never go to the movies because Hollywood never puts out anything they want to see. Regal Cinemas has teamed up with the producers of a new documentary called MURPH: The Protector for a limited nationwide release in select theaters on Friday, March 22nd. +Continue Reading
The folks over at Zero Dark Thirty want you to know that the actors they hired to play the SEALs who killed bin Laden got some excellent training from the kind of guys who actually killed bin Laden.
Zero Dark Thirty is a great movie, one that shows the men and women responsible for our national security as dedicated, determined, competent, intelligent and brave. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal also portray the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a systematic quest for justice rather than an overheated quest for revenge.
It’s not the movie Washington expected, but it’s not the movie that Hollywood expected, either.
Anyone who wants their art to conform to a set of political beliefs (or even just hew closely to a particular version of the facts) will immediately have a lot of issues with Zero Dark Thirty. It’s neither the pro-Obama hagiography that pre-release critics claimed it would be, nor is it the pro-torture apology that some have claimed since its first screenings in late November. +Continue Reading
Wired just enlisted SEAL Team Six trainer Don Mann (author of the The U.S. Navy SEAL Survival Handbook) to explain how the SEALs would handle daring Hollywood rescues in Return of the Jedi, Willow, Dawn of the Dead and The Dark Knight Rises. Mann’s solutions are brief, to the point and light on the kind of details that might constitute a security breach. You know, the opposite of every other SEAL movie and book released in 2o12. Check out his answers here.
And.…here we go. Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s movie about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, got its first public showing on Sunday in Los Angeles and early reviews are incredibly positive.
Bigelow and Boal were interviewed last night on ABC’s Nightline. Correspondent Martha Radditz called the movie “riveting” and gave the duo a chance to deny accusations that their screenplay was based on illegally leaked classified information. +Continue Reading
Here’s a clip from the National Geographic Channel’s Seal Team Six: The Raid On Osama Bin Laden movie, the one that premieres on Sunday, November 4th. For those of you keeping track, that’s two days before the presidential election. And for those of you who’ve had trouble keeping them straight, this movie has nothing to do with Zero Dark Thirty (which won’t open in theaters until December).
There’s a reason you might get confused, but here’s a guide for anyone looking for a conspiracy: this Kill Bin Laden movie was produced by Nicolas Chartier, the French guy who financed The Hurt Locker but didn’t get an Oscar for it because he was banned from the ceremony after sending out emails to voters that hyped his movie and badmouthed Avatar. That stunt cost him a relationship with director Kathryn Bigelow, so Chartier has zero to do with Zero Dark Thirty. +Continue Reading
Few books have hit shelves in recent years with as much controversy surrounding them as No Easy Day. Written under the pen name of Mark Owen by a former member of DEVGRU – better known as SEAL Team Six since the Osama Bin Laden takedown– the book is the first truly inside account of the mission that killed the chief terrorist behind 9/11.
That the book was published without the approval of the Department of Defense – something the Pentagon has made a very public spectacle out of – has created a buzz that has earned No Easy Day the kind of publicity that money can’t buy as well as the ire of a large segment of active duty troops and veterans who take their non-disclosure agreements a bit more seriously than Owen seems to. +Continue Reading
Word filtered out last week that “Mark Owen,” the author of No Easy Day is actually retired Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette. The upcoming memoir recounts Owen’s role in the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.
Now the LA Times quotes a source that says Bissonette’s post-retirement consulting firm Silent R has been working with Electronic Arts on the upcoming Medal of Honor: Warfighter game. If you’re making a game that recreates Tier One operative missions, there’s not much more Tier One than the Abbottabad raid.
We’re still awaiting comment from the guys at OPSEC Education Fund about possible leaked information in the book or the game.
So, Stars Earn Stripes Week 2. The weirdest thing about this reality shows is that they’re shot and edited to look like live sporting events but the fact is that the entire series was shot before the first episode aired. So it’s impossible to incorporate the excellent feedback our readers offered in the comments section on last week’s post.
Now that we’re past the introduction stage, NBC doesn’t need two hours to set up the challenge, so things moved a lot faster. The celebrities had to jump out of a helicopter onto a rooftop, take out some targets, rappel down the side of the eight-story building, meet their operative partners, take out some more targets and meet their extraction pickup truck.
Stop reading now if you don’t want to find out what happened in the challenge/competition/mission. +Continue Reading
![Der Gro?mufti von Jerusalem [Amin al Husseini] bei den bosnischen Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS. Der Gro?mufti ist auf dem Truppenubungsplatz ein[getroffen] und schreitet die Front der angetretenen Freiwilligen mit erhobenem Arm ab.](http://images-undertheradar.military.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/nazicollaborators300.jpg)
Under the Radar is commentary. We don’t report the news; we offer our take on what happened.
