Toward the end of “The War Within,” a brown man with a Muslim name sits in a car, contemplating a bridge leading to the big city, the city where twin towers once pierced the sky. In a nasty bit of racial profiling, he’s quickly arrested by one of New Jersey’s finest, but they’ve got nothing on him, so they let him go. The irony: Hassan, the man in the car, really is up to no good.
ROGER EBERT:
Two new movies both deal with terrorists preparing to blow themselves up in the process of murdering others and that makes them very timely right now. Paradise Now, which follows the last days of two Palestinians who are recruited and trained to cross over into Israel as human bombs, is one of these films. A woman who cares for one of these men tries to talk him out of this mission.
By Peter Relic
The extradition and torture of Pakistani engineer Hassan (cowriter Ayad Akhtar) sets in motion his transformation into the very thing he was not: a terrorist. While driving a cab and living in the family home of an old friend in New Jersey, Hassan follows the orders of a cell ringleader who rationalizes his own women-and-drink debauchery: “It’s good to taste the freedom that will destroy them.” This searing depiction of our seemingly endless “war on terror” hits home in every sense.
Grabbed from a Paris street by American commandos in a black SUV, a Pakistani engineering student is drugged and flown to a Karachi prison.
Three years later, he hides in a shipping container aboard a New York-bound freighter. Radicalized by the torture inflicted by his interrogators, Hassan (Ayad Akhtar) is now a suicide bomber aiming at Grand Central Station.
Immediately after 9/11–when seeing anything other than evil behind terrorism got Bill Maher and Susan Sontag lambasted–there was a limited audience in the U.S. for complex terrorists. But four years and a controversial war later, a few works are starting to hang flesh on those stick villains. In addition to Syriana and Sleeper Cell, there’s The War Within, a film about a plan to blow up New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, and Paradise Now, about Palestinian suicide bombers. Salman Rushdie has taken up the subject in his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown.