Customer Reviews

National Geographic - The FBI

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought the first 30 minutes (of 60 minutes) was good because Director Mueller meets with President Bush in the morning for a daily security briefing--something we commoners don't see every day. The DVD only shows him going from his office to the Whitehouse and meeting President Bush. No details.
There's no details on FBI's training at all--unlike a documentary of the FBI I had seen before on television which included extensive & recent details on their training from start to finish (I had hoped this DVD was that program).
The last half drags on with some FBI cases regarding gangsters during the 1900's--who cares??
The good:
The first 20 to 30 minutes.
Hoover bashing (basically, how crooked he was)

The Bad:
No details on FBI training.
No helpful information for those interested in becoming a FBI Agent.

Suggestions:
For those who are interested in a career with the FBI, I recommend the book "FBI Careers" by Ackerman. This book seem to have some helpful information that you won't find on the net. :)

This DVD was just OK, it wasn't good, and it wasn't bad. It goes in depth about how the FBI works in general, but doesn't go into cases in depth very much (Waco, Hanssen) etc. 90% of the video concentrates on how the FBI works now after 9/11, dealing with terrorism, but there wasn't any piece of it which highlighted thier priorities before 9/11. Some of the material nearly went as far as to being borderline propoganda, but the directors appear to have tried to stay away from that. It highlights some of the FBI's ups, and a few of thier down's. It goes into mostly how the FBI handles security of bigger events, but that was nothing new to me, and shouldn't be for any of you (snipers of roofs, instense screening, gaurds, etc.) Overall, I'd have to recomend you don't watch this, but if you know absolutely nothing about the FBI, this may be a good place to start learning.

This is a fairly well-presented documentary on the FBI. The creators of this film did a good job explaining what the FBI's role is, how that role has changed, and what should be expected in the future. It is a fairly superficial documentary, though: don't expect any complex analysis/insights into the operations of the FBI. Nevertheless, the editors did a fairly good job, got some interesting footage, and showed things that rarely are shown.

Considering that there aren't many well put-together documentaries available on the FBI, I thought that this one was excellent. You can only cover so much in two hurs, and I thought that this one did a very good job of it. There is also a very long feature on Hogan's Alley (mock city training center used by the FBI in Virginia) in the Special Features that was shot sometime in the late 80s/early 90s. I highly recommend this DVD if you're interested in a career with the FBI.

One review comments, "you can only cover so much in two hours." Well, this video is only 55 minutes long.
My first thought on watching it was, "this is SO much better than the National Geographic show on the Pentagon!"
The video is somewhat balanced and nuanced, pointing out some failures of the FBI along with its successes.
The video doesn't talk about FBI training, or about the huge scandal in the FBI lab in the 1990's, with the lab trying to prove guilt, sometimes through lying, instead of objectively analyzing the evidence. The video doesn't specifically even talk about the mission of the FBI. Yet the viewer gets an impression of what the FBI does.
The excellent narrator, Dennis Haysbert, who played President Palmer on "24," is not credited.
Only one review here has mentioned the bonus features. The DVD has two excellent 22-minute bonus features. The first is "Spies!", which first reviews some Cold War espionage equipment displayed at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, and then features interviews with an FBI counter-intelligence specialist and his former KGB opponent. The one real blooper in this feature is that the former FBI agent talks about the Bulgarian assassination umbrella as injecting cyanide into the victim. In reality the assassination umbrella injected ricin, which is 1000x as lethal as cyanide and virtually untraceable, producing fatal food poisoning-like symptoms.
The second bonus feature is "School for Feds," which shows the practical streeet training for FBI trainees at "Hogan's Alley," a realistic "town," putting FBI trainees in realistic investigation and arrest scenarios, and allowing them to make their mistakes in role-playing.
Read the other reviews, especially that of William K. It's a great buy here at under $5, and it's also available on netflix.

I found the documentary to be very interesting and I was able to learn a lot about the FBI. I do wish, however, that there was signifcantly more informatino regarding agent training.