Joseph Goebbels eat your heart out.

Rating: 1/10 (26 August 2009)

Steven Spielberh here directs a glorifying homage to revenge and violence. Which is fine if your making fiction, but is this a responsible way to deal with an important issue?
Some directors, Quentin Tarantino for example, get away with making films which bear no clear relationship to the morality or social laws which help society function on a daily basis. They do this by making it obvious that the film is a film, and is set in a separate (and in QT's example highly stylised) world, inconsistent with ours but relatively consistent with itself. This allows the presentation of violence in a somewhat positive light without the director being suceptible to accusations of moral vacuosity.
Spielberg here does not benefit from such a protective screen. Setting the film in the real world yet also presenting pre meditated violence as a brilliant virtue of Mossad is dubious to start with. But why present one type of violence (violence and terrorism with an emancipatory based legitimacy argument) as totally senseless, and another (A world wide romp of revenge and pre meditated murder) as the wholesome redemption of the Israeli international pride? It seems Spielberg may not have approached this from an independent perspective.
This would be fine, if he wasn't convincing other viewers of its Documentary like unbiased depth. This is a film which is designed wholeheartedly to promote the Israeli world view, and based in a mindset of hate, revenge and a lack of dialogue, which would be great entertainment if it didn't try and pretend it was a fair and realistic presentation of fact.