Part of the agreement provided that Saudi Arabia was allowed to continue its violent and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, free from external influence.

[1]The title is taken from the 1945 meeting of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, on a ship on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal.

[2] Emma Graham-Harrison, also writing in The Guardian, noted that Curtis had done "a powerful job of conveying the sheer physical incongruity of NATO's heavy military presence in impoverished Afghanistan", and had captured "the strangeness of these heavily armoured soldiers wandering through superficially tranquil villages and pomegranate orchards, hunting an invisible enemy, and with it a deeper truth about how mismatched the soldiers were to their mission."

While critical of some aspects of the film, particularly "of doing what he criticises politicians for: creating oversimplified stories to make sense of a complex world, and losing sight of the truth in the process", she felt that Curtis had managed to convey "the west’s terrible arrogance, the casual projection of foreign dreams and ideals on to a distant country and the readiness to walk away when it all starts going wrong".

Beyond the "extraordinary visuals", "the hypnotic jumble of footage", and the "insistent soundtrack pump[ing] out a manipulative pulse of music from East and West, telling you what to feel", Rees was less convinced by the film's narrative, describing it as "like being hectored by a dazzling know-all with x-ray vision who espies connections across the map of history."

He concluded that "the egotism and grandiloquence are maddeningly at odds with the sustained brilliance of the spectacle", and "In the end, Adam Curtis sounds like just another prophet asking us to have faith in his vision.

"[4] Jon Boone, the Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian, was less impressed by the film in his review for The Spectator, calling it "as simplistic as anything told by 'those in power', [and] made to seem frightfully clever by his acid-trip filmmaking style, perfectly spoofed by Ben Woodham as the 'televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence'".

"[5] While also pointing to some of its limitations in his review for the online magazine Spiked, the academic Bill Durodie suggested the abiding image of the film to be "that of an English art teacher enthusiastically extolling the meaning of Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual artwork, Fountain, an inverted male urinal, to a group of recently liberated and incredulous Afghan women", before concluding his piece with the phrase "The horror!