If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

First off, I wanted to point out that it was very hard to follow this movie, for many reasons. The version I watched did not have subtitles or overdubbing, yet basically all of the talking, except the intermittent narrator, was done in other languages. If you are going to make a one-sided movie to tell one side of a conflict, at least tell let us hear about it. I found myself looking at pictures for 2-minute intervals between a 10 second narration or two quick lines of text. Maybe it was just the copy I saw, but it didn't really help it's case.Second off, the movie was incredibly one-sided. I know, I know, it's a propaganda film, so it will be, but this was very over the top. I didn't see any Arabs cutting off heads, or detonating suicide bombs at markets and schools, or gassing thousands of Kurds.What many people fail to realize, is that Israel wasn't just created out of nothing. Much of the original area that was "granted" to Israel in 1947 (And previously, in 1917) had been bought by the Jews from the Ottoman empire which ruled the area for hundreds of years. During the first World War, the Jews and Arabs were somewhat of allies against the Turks due to being discriminated against.The Arabs tried to force the Jews out of the lands they had paid for, when the Ottoman empire collapsed. The Arabs are the ones who refused to live with the Jews. The day after Israel declared independence, the armies of five Arab countries invaded (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon). During this time, Jews were discriminated against in Arab countries, having property stolen and denied citizenship.In the mid-50s, Egypt closed the Suez canal to Israeli shipping, until Israel attacked the Sinai Peninsula. Israel withdrew after Egypt agreed to lift the anti-Jewish ban.Again in 1967 the allied Arab states sought to destroy Israel, expelling UN peacekeepers and initiating a six-day war that left Israel in control of Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and east Jerusalem. Even after giving control of the Gaza Strip back, the Arabs launched attacks, killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and have done everything in their power to cause violence.As is often the case, there are two sides to every story, and this film does a very poor job of telling either side of any of the conflicts it portrays.

I was forced to watch this in one of my college classes, big surprise. For me, i thought that this film was horrible. This is not a documentary because it doesn't give both sides of the issue, that's what "big noise films" is known for. If you are a radical-liberal, socialist and/or are studying social movements and uprisings, then there is a good chance you will like it. The film shows social uprisings in impoverished areas of horrible countries. It is framed in the classic propaganda fashion, by using violent/moving images, words, and taking quotes out of context, among other things. So when you watch this, be thinking or remembering that there are two sides to the argument, and that most people in the world want to be in this country. Also be ready to see some pretty messed up images.

The Fourth World War is another earnest effort by filmmakers to underline the severe social and economic injustices that continue to escalate, not decrease, around the world. Seven years after this film was made, it seems to me that not much has changed. Despite the titanic struggles of dispossessed peoples around the world, the wealth of nations continues to reside in fewer and fewer hands. The economies of poor countries collapse under vicious IMF policies, and capitalism's global 'clubs' thrive ever and ever upward. Meanwhile, people keep struggling, ultimately downward.The depressing thing is that the world does not get better because of documentaries like this. There are miniscule victories here and there, but the world carries on as it has always carried on: the rich just get richer, and the poor keep fighting uphill battles. I've been on the streets many times over four decades, demonstrating against the rape of the world by global capitalism. A lot of people think it's healthy to ventilate, but it's ultimately futile: if demonstrations brought governments down, they'd be outlawed. The democracy we live with is a myth.This is a necessary film, but it just reminded me of bloody depressing it all is.

This film is a look at "the fourth world war", the global resistance of the working people of the world against the war being made on us by the owners of the world. It covers the last few years of this resistance, from the general strike of workers in South Korea, to the resistance to launching the war against Iraq.The documentary is made by the same group which made the excellent documentary "This is What Democracy Looks Like", and like that movie the producers say they are indebted to Indymedia and activist groups for their help in making this. Like that film, this one pretty much lets events speak for themselves - as in that movie, you are in the streets with the people struggling, this time not in Seattle, but in Mexico, Palestine, Korea, Argentina, South Africa and so forth.There is a gut-wrenching scene of doctors in Jenin trying to save a little girl whose body was completely shot up by Israeli soldiers, and then her father crying over her dead body. One thing that occurred to me while watching this is that this is that I would absolutely never see this on the US corporate media. My tax dollars are what paid for the bullets who shot that little girl, as are every US citizen taxpayers, which is why the existence of such things is completely absent from all that you watch on TV. It is wiped from existence, as surely as commissars in the USSR wiped events from existence. Thankfully, people are out there making films like these.