American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden Review
Director: Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan
Date Created: 2025-05-14 22:41
4.5
American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden Review: Netflix’s much-awaited docuseries is finally streaming today (May 14, 2025) on your screens after it was deferred from March. Directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, the series has three compelling episodes that deliver a deep dive into the multi-year Osama Bin Laden manhunt, the mastermind of the devastating 9/11 attacks on America.
The docuseries features gripping interviews with the CIA operatives, United States government and military officials who make the mission come to life. Using actual footage, expert analysis and sardonic narration, it shows how the world united to track down and kill one of history’s most-wanted men.
American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden Review
I ran across the trailer and didn’t really know what to make of it. This is a tale we’ve seen dramatised in movies, and so I expected this to be a take on one of those. But having seen all three parts, I can tell you that it is, in fact, different: for the truth, the accuracy and the depth of feeling it has for its subject.
The only thing I was completely surprised by was how the series started with travelling back to the awful 9/11 attacks. I was too young to understand what I saw during the attacks, but the first raw footage I had seen of the buildings and the stories had me in tears. The show isn’t merely oriented around that final big raid, though, it treats with equal weight the years of misses, mishaps and backstage politics that led to this cat-and-mouse chase becoming a global sniff at all.
I respect that Netflix’s American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden doesn’t try to whitewash any of it. It is honest about many things that went wrong in that pursuit, wrong choices, intelligence missed, opportunities when Bin Laden could have been captured but was not. That kind of honesty has no precedent in the history of national security. It didn’t sound like propaganda to me. It sounded genuine.
The interviews were a big part of this docuseries. The show was given a great deal of realism by those on the ground in the form of real-life CIA operatives and military officers who participated in the operation. They were not politicians trying to spin something into something positive, but rather felt genuine, got emotional and were able to admit when things went wrong. It is easy to read about history, but to hear someone talk about it who actually experienced it is different, and this show does a good job of showing us that.
The structure of the series is also great. It is chronological, starting from the days after the 9/11 attacks through the final mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Bin Laden was killed. The suspense goes on, even though we already know how this will end. The night vision and drone camera footage from the final episode was certainly effective in ramping up the tension. It had the feeling of reading a thriller, except that the thriller had occurred.
At the same time, I was irritated by certain aspects. The documentary has questions about how some leaders, particularly in the early years, suppressed warnings and allowed political imperatives to shape decisions within the army. As a citizen of India, a country equally afflicted by the terror and in which far too many innocent lives have been lost, I couldn’t help thinking how different it would have been if the great powers had acted and acted with greater wisdom, sooner.
As a viewer, American Manhunt is eye-opening. This documentary isn’t just telling you the story, it’s taking you through the emotional, political and human toll of the story. Whatever, great series, and I was reminded of something I already knew: History isn’t dates and events, history is people, the people who made the decisions, the people who were killed, the people who were injured because other people made the decisions
Summing Up
Overall, American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden is one of the most powerful documentaries I’ve watched this year. It’s a raw, unapologetic judgment on how justice was pursued, how errors were committed, and how high the toll was when you allowed politics to embrace security. If you care about the world, recent history or simply want to know what the devil himself was up to in one of the most infamous events of the 21st century, this is a must-watch.
American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden docuseries is now streaming on Netflix.
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