This is an important, courageous, and powerful film.

Rating: 10/10 (2 January 2006)

Three adjectives come to me in describing the film I saw last night: important, courageous, and powerful.
I consider it to be among the most important films -- and certainly the most important of Spielberg's -- because it has us look at one historical event in order to understand a crucial parallel reality: namely the direction our nation is going in places like Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. When Avner asked if Israel was actually going after the Palestinian leadership as opposed to the terrorist leadership, he asked what we all need to ask: is the U.S. government's "response" to 9-11 -- bombing the people of Afghanistan, bombing and occupying Iraq, threatening Syria -- actually an attempt to stop resistance movements to U.S. imperialism as opposed to stopping terrorism?
And the whole film asks us to reevaluate violence in "response" to terrorism: whether it's the U.S. government's support of Israeli terrorism in Palestine or its own terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, we need to ask Avner's questions about whether violence solves anything -- whether or not we understand that our government is simply using 9-11 as an excuse to carry out a pre-developed plan to take control of the region for their corporate agenda.
The fact that our government is stirring up these tensions in a region where three governments (including Israel's) are nuclear-armed and hate each other makes this film even more important to the survival of the planet.
Secondly, I consider this, by far, Spielberg's most courageous film. It's always important to make films that expose racism (Amistad) and anti-Semitism (Schindler's List), but those are pretty safe topics. But to question Israel, even letting Palestinians voice their anguish at the occupation? In a world where non- Jews who do so are branded "anti-Semitic" (really ironic since Arabs are also Semitic) and Jews who do so are called "self-hating," this takes guts -- even if you are Steven Spielberg.
Now, I've read angry critiques of the film for not going into the horrendous attacks of Israel on Palestinians before and after Munich, as well as of the film's portrayal of remorse in their agents while the reality is that Israeli soldiers do often kill children with impunity. While justified, these critiques don't take into consideration that the film does go as far as it does, and in the political climate that we have. The film does, after all, have an Israeli character ask something like, "How do you think we got our homeland? By being nice?"
Finally, I believe this is Spielberg's most powerful film, simply because he's so skilled at doing what he sets out to do with issues that are so important. I have long thought that he is an extraordinarily powerful person; after all he can get strong men and women to ache and even cry over a character played by a thing made in his prop department or over an African American woman entering into a lesbian relationship. I've long asked, "What if Spielberg were to ever take on a truly controversial and important subject, like challenging Zionism, imperialism, or war?" I believe he's begun to rise to the occasion with this film.
I wish I could personally encourage him to do so more. There are so many other subjects he could take up: the refuseniks (the courageous Israeli soldiers who, in growing number, are refusing to fight in occupied Palestine), or Mordechai Venunu (the Israeli imprisoned for revealing that his government was secretly building nuclear arms), or Palestinians and Jews who are today participating in nonviolent actions against the occupation, or even stories of Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews whose friendships were shattered by the forming of Israel in 1948.
Thank you, Mr. Spielberg. May you continue on this path of exercising your immense power for the lifting of humanity.