Here is what Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea, says about the film. It is as I feared, that the atrocity of Daniel Pearl’s end would get diluted in the effort to “contextualize” the story, bring in the “root causes”:
“At the same time, I am worried that A Mighty Heart falls into a trap Bertrand Russell would have recognized: the paradox of moral equivalence, of seeking to extend the logic of tolerance a step too far. You can see traces of this logic in the film’s comparison of Danny’s abduction with Guant√°namo–it opens with pictures from the prison–and its comparison of Al Qaeda militants with CIA agents. You can also see it in the comments of the movie’s director, Michael Winterbottom, who wrote on The Washington Post’s website that A Mighty Heart and his previous film The Road to Guant√°namo “are very similar. Both are stories about people who are victims of increasing violence on both sides. There are extremists on both sides who want to ratchet up the levels of violence and hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this.”
http://www.solomonia.com/blog/2007/07/judea_pearl_on_a_mighty_heart/#more
