Zero Dark Thirty

Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad Pakistan
More pictures here

    A fine film. With all the spy books and movies I've consumed I think I'm beginning to get an idea how this surveillance business works. It's expensive, time consuming and horribly boring. It takes a certain kind of person to focus on so little for so long with so little to show for it. And then there's the logic you need in order to piece together what's happening from the most disparate of clues, or just as likely, the lack of clues.
    The movie makes a big deal of out how they used special "stealthy" helicopters for this mission. If they did, it's really a well kept secret. I suspect they were regular old Blackhawk helicopters. They may have had some special modifications, but they weren't completely different. The best description I found was on Shadow Spear dot com:

The SEALs flew into Pakistan from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), an airborne unit of the United States Army Special Operations Command sometimes called the "Nighthawks," provided two modified Black Hawk helicopters, and two Chinooks as backups. The 160th SOAR helicopters were supported by multiple other aircraft, including fixed-wing fighter jets and drones. According to CNN, "The Air Force also had a full team of combat search-and-rescue helicopters available."

Kathryn Bigelow directs. I've heard of her before.
The practice compound in North Carolina (one of the pictures in the linked photo album) isn't there anymore.

Update November 2019 replaced dead Picasa slideshow with single image and link to Google Photos album.