Search - Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? on DVD

Very good but not quite what he's capable of producing

Matthew G. Sherwin | last seen screaming at Amazon customer service | 05/14/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? is another film by the highly creative and rather brave Morgan Spurlock. Although the film has its flaws, it makes some extremely good points about human nature and how people who seem to be so different from us are actually much more similar to us than we may have thought. The cinematography works very well throughout the film. These cameramen did an excellent job; they shot over 800 hours of footage in order to make this film! (Now that's an editing job!) Morgan doesn't really need to act much in this movie; he's on a quasi-serious mission to find Osama Bin Laden. I think he knew from the start that he was making a film about people we may fear when we don't need to fear them; I doubt that he was actually expecting Bin Laden to come jumping out of a cave somewhere and say, "OK, Morgan, here I am! I surrender!"



We first see Morgan preparing for his trip. He gets more injections than I could count; and he takes some training exercises to be able to protect himself against grenade bombs, would-be assassins and more. He also has to leave his pregnant wife behind him but he promises her that he'll be back in time for their baby to be born.



Once Morgan gets where he's going, he asks people questions. In fact, he asks a lot of questions. We get fascinating interviews with people on the street and there are more interviews with some other people who were kind enough to let Morgan Spurlock into their homes. Morgan frequently, if not always, asks them their opinion of America, Israel, Osama Bin Laden and more. We often see people saying that they have nothing against the American people; but wow, how they hate the American government. He does encounter some trouble from a few people who don't want to be interviewed; but I don't think he was too surprised by this.



Along the way Morgan Spurlock uses humor in an apparent attempt to make the subject matter a bit easier for people to swallow. In my opinion, this didn't always work. For example, Spurlock asks an Afghani man about a Tora Bora amusement park plan, Spurlock suggests that they call it "the bomb." Hey, the country's been at war for 30 years--that's not necessarily going to be perceived as a funny joke, Morgan! The guy being interviewed didn't laugh; and even though some of us might laugh I wouldn't have taken that chance with someone in a tough foreign country where trouble is easy to find, especially when they had been nice enough to sit down with me for an interview. In addition, Spurlock mocks both his own efforts as well as the international efforts to find Bin Laden for real; he approaches the entrance to a cave and yells "Osama., are you in there?" Yeah, it IS funny; but it's also naïve and silly, not to mention potentially dangerous--who knows who might really have been in that cave at the time? Morgan also skips over Iran and Iraq; he apparently knew enough to set some limits on his quest to find Bin Laden.



Overall, the film is about a B+. Morgan Spurlock's true message in this film is that we should fear other cultures less and recognize them as being much more like us than they are different from us. He could have done a better job of proving this when he went to one or two of the countries he visited; but he gets his point across nonetheless. I recommend this film for people studying this situation and sociologists will have a field day watching this film.

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