I just read this in today's Wall Street Journal (excerpted below)...

The austere but gripping "Bullet in the Head," which has already been released in Spain and comes out in France in March, is part of a new wave of fact-based European films grappling with terrorism in striking and unusually visual ways. Other examples include "Hunger," a brutally savage yet painterly depiction of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands' 1981 hunger strike directed by English contemporary artist and former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen; Germany's Golden Globe-nominated "The Baader Meinhof Complex," about a radical group of left-wing European terrorists who began operating at the end of the 1960s and gave birth to the Red Army Faction; and the French-made "Public Enemy No. 1, parts 1 & 2," a diptych of films about the notorious gangster and pseudo-terrorist Jacques Mesrine, who roiled France during the 1970s.

All these films have attracted controversy for choosing to depict terrorism from the terrorists' point of view -- an approach far removed from the usual Hollywood focus on officers enforcing the law.
from Radical Chic: Europe's New Wave of Films About Terrorism
Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2009

I don't have a lot to say on this, but I am interested in the reaction from the rest of the board, particularly the social sciences folks. As someone with an interest in training and military education, I see value in films that are able to convey the motivations and general mindset of our adversaries. If that can help to educate our personnel and make them more effective in combating our adversaries and in deterring people from joining their ranks, then great. On the other hand, I wonder whether the directors, "get it right." When is the last time that you saw a movie about the US military that even came close to getting it right?

That thought aside, should it trouble us that the rest of our society will be watching these films? Is there any real danger that a significant number of people will become sympathetic to our adversaries? Or that the films might even be recruitment tools within our country or, more likely, in countries where the terrorists/insurgents/others generally hail from?