I liked it so much because it is complex and doesn't give easy answers. The War Within starts out with an innocent man walking down the streets of Paris and talking on his cell phone. Out of nowhere, a group of men jump out of a black SUV, grab the man on his cell, throw him into the SUV, and ship him to a prison camp in Pakistan where he is then tortured for the next three years. And all this happens even before the opening credits.
The man on his cell phone is named Hassan, and the men in the black SUV are American CIA agents who kidnap and torture Hassan because (we later learn) his brother lead a peaceful anti-war protest in Afghanistan. Three years later, after enough torture and abuse to drive any man crazy, Hassan is released from prison and travels to America to get his revenge. So clearly he's a bad guy, right? But then again, he was no threat to anyone before he was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for three years. So then is America the bad guy? What makes The War Within so intelligent and so superb is that isn't a story about good guys and bad guys. It's a story about the mammoth "War on Terror" and how it affects a single group of Pakistani immigrants in New York. The only bad guys are the acts of violence themselves, and all sides of guilty of that. You absolutely have to see this exquisite character study and you have to tell everyone you know to see it, too.
