This is a meaningful film of deep meditation in which Director Spielberg draws parallelism in connoting the similarity between the ungrounded vengeance of the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen)'s cabinet on the Palestinian terrorists and that of the Bush administration on Iraq, alongside a theme on the futility of the karma of endless vengeances.

As the fact in history is well known to the audience, Spielberg uses unrestricted narrative in the chasing sequences (the first 90 mins) to enable a global view of the audience and restricted narrative in the last hour to centripetally escort the mind of the audience back to the thematic issue of the meaning of revenge and thereby effectively presents a fair balance between filmic tension & political ideology.

To add vividness to the narrative, Spielberg builds variations in chasing & assassinations to create variety and tension on how the Palestinian assassins are killed one by one by Avner (Eric Bana)'s team. Complexity is added with the presence of the female assassin, which also serves as the turning point on Avner's team on the direction and correctness of their mission. Low angle shots are used frequently to depict the powerfulness of Avner's team. Three flashback sequences are inserted at certain interval in the screen time of 164 mins to reveal the death of the 11 Israeli hostages of the Black September incident in 1972. Spielberg adopts a structured narrative arrangement in a way so that as Avner queries more on the act he is commanded to commit, the narrative reveals more on the 1972 incident with Avner's emotion progressively escalating from calmness to agitation. The theme is explicitly expounded in the sequence of encounter between Avner's team and the Palestinians in the abandoned building.

The factual details of the Black September incident are finely made in accordance with the history. The entire film is slow paced on the whole and it flows smoothly throughout. Prior knowledge on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would enhance the audience's understanding of the movie. Spielberg does not fill all gaps and uses open ending to perpetuate the meditation of the audience. It is a good film.