9 War Movie Tricks That Totally Fooled You
7. Stealth Helicopters - Zero Dark Thirty
While some movies tell broader stories of conflict in particular wars, others zero in on specific events, some fictional and some not so fictional. In the case of the latter, Zero Dark Thirty told the cinematic version of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
By its very nature, an operation like this is shrouded in secrecy, and no amount of help from the Department of Defence was going to open certain doors in terms of portraying the events as accurately as possible.
Arguably the biggest example of this in Zero Dark Thirty is the stealth helicopters. Towards the end of the movie, when an almost decade-long manhunt appears to reveal the whereabouts of the target, the CIA are in a position to storm said safe-house. To do so, they used stealth helicopters. Images of the actual helicopters used have never been revealed to the public, and so the production team on the film had to get creative.
Using a photograph that allegedly only shows the tail rotor of one of these helicopters, the team worked backwards to create an incredibly realistic design that didn't feel out of place in the slightest.