“SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden”

8 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic Channel

“SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden” isn’t just a “real-life, full-length action thriller,” as the National Geographic Channel likes to say. And it isn’t a piece of political propaganda designed to swing the election, as some conservatives suggest. It’s a strange amalgam of behind-the-scenes imagining, video simulations, archival footage and patriotic odes to the military regarding a rather recent event. Producer Nicholas Chartier (“The Hurt Locker”) teamed with the Weinstein Company to deliver this strangely compelling blur of fact and dramatized truth. Director John Stockwell (“Into the Blue”) claims the origins of the film were not political.

“Producer and financier Chartier is French and decidedly apolitical,” Stockwell wrote in the production notes. The film premieres Sunday on National Geographic Channel. Netflix subscribers will have access to “SEAL Team Six” the day after it airs. The election-eve timing is controversial. Obama-haters will cringe at the heroics credited to the president, as the film replays speeches in which Obama promises to find the al-Qaeda leader. Stockwell notes that Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Secretary of State Robert Gates all opposed the raid, suggesting it wasn’t worth the risk and the billions of dollars required. The film details the potentially disastrous outcomes that could have been Obama’s equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran, a political disaster.

Red or blue, viewers can agree the election-eve timing is curious. It’s the first original film for National Geographic Channel, slated a few weeks before “Zero Dark Thirty,” another film about the raid by “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow.”

SEAL Team Six” begins as the U.S. learns the name of an al-Qaeda functionary. But how? Questions arise immediately. Did that successful Guantanamo interrogation really happen because the operative colorfully explained potential torture tactics, as the film suggests? Was it the least violent interrogation in the history of interrogations? We’ll never know.

From there to the launch of the mission into the fortified bin Laden compound, the film amps the tension at every step.

Dramatic music. Zooming maps. Condensed time, quick cuts and bold edits. No telling how much is Hollywood, how much is the Pentagon and how much is from the memories of unnamed individuals who were part of the effort.”

The whole story may be more haphazard, more riddled with bureaucratic snags and altogether less slick. But this movie is about heroism. And as such, it succeeds in telling a national success story.