In my opinion, Zeitgeist did exactly what it was meant to do: spark discussion. It employs the same type of propaganda used by anyone/anything else, deceiving and manipilating the audience into making "realizations." He gets the audience scared of a hostile and manipulative world through the same manipulation techniques that he claims are employed by the "elite." Oh the irony. Hopefully, however, people did not take the video at face value, but instead, decided to give the points mentioned in the video thought. Some facts are indeed accurate, but the creator's use of the facts to make assumptions is clearly tainted. He draws connections that had no business being drawn.
The creator's facts and ideas about the creation of religion come as no shock to me. I listened intently to the connections between modern religions and the Egyptian religion, and am very well aware that the Church had a chokehold on almost everything during the middle ages. However, I was forced to cringe at the tactical propaganda that had been inserted into the video. He villifies the Church and calls religion "untrue." But where did that come from? None of the facts that he peppers the video with are enough to claim any religion untrue. His “findings” in no way cover outlandish assumptions such as this.
Then, the author moves on to discuss the world of propaganda that we encounter today. Some of the facts were truly eye opening- I of course cross-checked the information- but these facts do not support his extremist theories. Logic and reasoning that are provided by his facts are butchered by his ideas about how they relate to the world. Yes, the 9-11 attacks do seem fishy, but I wouldn't necessarily attribute them to the bankers of the world. (as an aside: I really love how the movie talks about how governments villify others to get control; And then the movie moves on to talk about the "evil attributes" and actions of the elite (how different they are from us) that we should hate. Hypocrisy, anyone?) Yes, there are a lot of things that go on in government behind closed doors, and corruption is rampant whether or not we notice it, but the actual explanations for events may be entirely different than those we can conceive. The problem boils down to this: we will never know the actual truth-not in our lifetimes at least. Truth about secret corruption only ever seems to be revealed when the corrupt body is destroyed, (or maybe information just brings about the downfall of the corrupt body). Hopefully, some day, we will understand.
Because I am unaware of the author's intentions in his creation of this movie, I might assume that he was a radical maniac who wants to do battle with "the man." However, it is equally likely that the creator of this movie thought rationally about facts that he researched and wanted to make the biggest impact on the public possible. Maybe he wanted to trigger actual discussion (rather than the mindless drone of the repetition of facts). Maybe he wanted to push the world to research and understand of its own will. Maybe his ultimate goal was to inspire thought, and this is the only way he could do so. Or maybe, he simply wanted to manipulate an unsuspecting population into acting on beliefs that he knows to be invalid for his own personal and unrevealed reasons. Sadly, this is, among many things, an unknown that may stay hidden. All that we can do is take this video as we should grasp our world, ignoring intentions and propaganda, so that we can create opinions for ourselves.