Osama Bin Laden Movie picked up by Sony

By Sarah Sluis

American citizens may not ever see the real pictures of Osama Bin Laden after he was killed by American special forces, but they'll be able to see the movie next year. Director Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar for her depiction of soldiers defusing IEDs in Iraq in The Hurt Locker, has been working on the picture for years. Without the ending, that is. The project, dubbed Kill Bin Laden, originally centered on the quest of Navy SEALs to hunt down Bin Laden, but now that the non-cave dwelling Bin Laden is dead, the script will be able to go out with a bang.

I'm bullish on the prospects of the Bin Laden movie. Unlike United 93, which revisited an incident in American history that many people couldn't bring themselves to watch (I don't want to cry in an action movie!), people actually want to see the end of the leader of Al Qaeda. Much of what went on was top-secret, and I for one want to know more about the stealth helicopter. So that's what our tax dollars are going towards.

Bigelow is directing the film and Mark Boal, who wrote and produced The Hurt Locker, is finalizing the script. Aussie Joel Edgerton has signed on to lead, and now that Sony has picked up the project, they've given it a release date: Q4 2012. Awards season.

The successful killing of Bin Laden adds another twist to Boal's script. The movie was supposed to be about the Navy SEALs' attempt to kill Bin Laden, not their success. The Hurt Locker ended on an ambivalent note, but Bin Laden's death tacks on a "happy" ending to Bigelow and Boal's story. Or will it? If their original concept was about failure, about the lack of closure, perhaps there will be a note of subversion or anti-war commentary thrown in. However, The Hurt Locker toed the line, never coming out for or against the war. In The New York Times review of The Hurt Locker, critic A. O. Scott notes "The filmmakers' insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well...[the movie] depicts men...who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there." Under the supervision of Bigelow and Boal, Kill Bin Laden will be anything but a broad, unnuanced recreation of events, and there might even be another Oscar or two for the duo.