Perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of the film, besides the obvious benefit of refraining from moralizing, is its almost total lack of dramatic effects, so characteristic of Hollywood-style filmmaking. The suspense comes mainly from what we know from the news rather than from what the film shows. In fact, if we "bracket out" our knowledge of what suicide bombing is in the real life - the suspense disappears altogether, and the action is reduced to plain boredom and third-rate theatrics (especially the speeches given by the protagonists).
This, I believe, is what the message of the film really is - suicide bombing is not driven by strongly held convictions and passions or religious fanaticism. It is playing a part in a third-rate scripted play deeply embedded in collective consciousness of a society - with its canned speeches staged in front of a camera (that ironically malfunctions in a critical moment) and turned into cheap videos sold in the way porn is sold in this country. The characters seem to play their roles quite casually, e.g. Khaled (one of the protagonists selected for the mission) adding a message to his mother about a sale item he just saw to his scripted speech about the mission itself or Jamal (the leader of the cell organizing the mission) casually telling "what will happen next" (Two angels will take you straight to the paradise) as if he was a playwright struggling to end the hopelessly entangled plot and resorting to one of the most hackneyed literary devices - a "deus ex machina" ending.
Suha's (the female character trying to persuade the protagonists to abandon their mission) speeches are not that much better. They sound more sympathetic to the Western ears - but they are basically a recitation of platitudes supplied a dime a dozen by the mainstream media in Paris, London, Rome or New York.
In the end, the entire drama is reduced to recitations of trite canned speeches in a third rate show. Yet, the audience is kept in high suspense throughout the entire length of the film - but that suspense comes from what we know from the news and which the director (Hany Abu-Assad) consciously does not show - the "big bang" at the end.
In the film - and I suspect in reality - it is the prospect of the bombers exploding their belts that adds the suspense to the otherwise cheap drama in which the protagonists play their parts. Yet the film is deliberately ambiguous whether the mission is finally carried out. Khaled, who was more gung-ho about the mission, changes his mind at the very end. Said, who had more reservations decides to continue, but mainly for warped personal reasons - to "avenge" his father who was executed by the Palestinian resistance as an Israeli collaborator. The logic of that motive is as pathetic as the rest of the scripts recited by the protagonists in the film: "they" made him do it and "they" will price for it. The film ends with Said boarding a bus full of Israeli soldiers, but then had an opportunity to blow up another bus and he decided not to, perhaps because he saw a woman and a kid on that other bus, but the audience does not know that for sure.
Although the film has been widely praised by critics for "not taking the sides" in this highly charged political conflict, I do not think this assessment is quite accurate. After all the film does take a side, albeit in a dialectical (in the Hegelian-Marxist sense) way - by producing a "synthesis" of the conflicting sides, which stipulates that the conflict is really a perpetual re-enactment of scripted drama with a predictable ending. Once the re-enactors realize that (as Khaled did) changing the script does offer a way out if, and that is a big if, the protagonists take responsibility for their own decisions and choices instead of relying on canned scripts embedded in popular culture.
Wojtek