The director of The Hurt Locker takes on the 9/11 mastermind.

The first account of Osama Bin Laden’s death was like the screenplay for a John Wayne movie. A team of highly trained special forces—Navy Seals willing to die for their country—had helicoptered deep into Pakistan and entered Bin Laden’s secret compound in a late-night surprise attack. A firefight with Bin Laden’s armed bodyguards followed, in which amazingly none of the Seals were injured or killed. The stronghold was secured. When the Seals reached Bin Laden’s living quarters, the armed leader of al Qaeda tried to use one of his wives as a human shield, so a sharp-shooting Seal aimed high and blew away the top of his head.

Old-fashioned justice was served, not the law on the books, but the law of the Western frontier that has long been cinema’s stock and trade. The villain dies with a gun in his hand, and the hero in the white hat, honest and honorable, overcomes impossible odds. The familiar narrative sent people out into the streets waving American flags in triumph and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” as Americans reportedly first did when our ragtag hockey team upset Soviet professionals in the 1980 Winter Olympics. This is the version of Bin Laden’s death that most Americans wanted to hear, having waited for a decade after 9/11 to get the guy who did it.

 

In the days that followed, we learned that this story was far from the truth, which emerged more slowly and disjointedly. The raid had not been flawless: one of the high-tech choppers had gone down for unexplained reasons and had to be destroyed; the Seals faced almost no armed resistance; Bin Laden himself was not armed, nor did he use his wife as a shield; and two Seals shot him at close range, one bullet hitting him in the head, the other in the chest. Many in the Muslim world thought he died a martyr.

Which version of the story will take its place in popular history? No doubt Hollywood will have something to say about that. Only days after Bin Laden’s corpse slid into the Arabian Sea, a Hollywood director, Kathryn Bigelow, announced that a screenplay was underway and the first actor had been cast. In fact Bigelow and writer Mark Boal had already been working on a screenplay dealing with the search for Bin Laden. Now they had an ending.