Not anti-semitic, and not accurate
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ begins today in theaters. I havn't seen it, and I'll probably wait for DVD. Until then, my reaction is only second hand- and is not so much a reaction to the film as a reaction to the reaction. My two general hunches are this: 1) Gibson did not set out to cast scorn on the Jews (although I don't dismiss the real possibility of indirect anti-semitism, and in that vein, some careless work from Gibson); 2) the movie is, despite the producers' assertions, historically inaccurate. It is this second issue that seems most problematic. Purported historic truth is dangerous.

First, the script is not drawn strictly from the Gospels. (btw, I heard a preacher on CNN today saying the movie was accurate because it comes from eyewitness accounts...the Gospels. ??? Wonder if the preacher knows just how many decades after Jesus' death Mark was written?) Rather, the script also drew on visions of Christ's Passion received and written up by two seventeenth-century nuns. The work can be found in the diaries of Ven. Ane Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) in the book "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." A list of problematic elements of that account of the passion can be found in Creighton University's Journal of Religion and Society.

As Professor Fredriksen (Prof of Scripture at Boston University) writes in The New Republic, "To depict a first-century event by drawing on visionary writings composed almost two millennia later makes no sense at all: one might as well try to reconstruct ancient armor by peering at Bruegel."
The movie furthers its semblance of authenticity by using Aramaic and Latin. The first is correctly used, the second is a blunder. The Jewish high priest and the Roman prefect spoke to each other in Greek. Pilate's troops, while employees of Rome, were not "Romans." They were Greek-speaking local gentiles.
Fredriksen writes:

Then The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Hutton Gibson, the actor's father. He is what modern Catholics politely term a "traditionalist." Hutton Gibson considers the current papacy to be illegitimate. Vatican II--the Roman Church council in 1965 that, inter alia, changed liturgical language from Latin to spoken vernaculars, and expressed as a theological point of principle that all Jews everywhere could not be held culpable for the death of Jesus--he dismisses as a coup pulled off by Freemasons and Jews. He is also given to idiosyncrasy about the Holocaust (he believes that it never happened) and about September 11 (he believes that Al Qaeda was not involved).

The father's views, the article properly noted, cannot simply be imputed to the son. But the Times also noted that the son has aired his own contempt for the Vatican, and has generously financed and very visibly endorsed assorted "traditionalist" endeavors. And now he is committed to making this graphically violent film called The Passion. In light of the historical connection between the charge of Christ-killing and Christian anti-Jewish violence, might the film upset Jews? "It may," Gibson conceded. "It's not meant to. It's meant just to tell the truth."

Fredriksen knows quite a bit about the forming of this screebplay, becasue she was on a committee of professors that reviewed it for accuracy. Some excerpts from here TNR article:

We already knew that Gibson's efforts to be "as truthful as possible" (his own words in the Times) would be frustrated by the best sources that he had to draw on, namely, the Gospels themselves. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, whose texts were composed in Greek between 70 C.E. and 100 C.E., differ significantly on matters of fact. In Mark, Jesus's last meal is a Passover seder; in John, Jesus is dead before the seder begins. Mark and Matthew feature two night "trials" before a full Jewish court, and a dramatic charge of "blasphemy" from the high priest. Luke has only a single trial, early in the morning, and no high priest. John lacks this Jewish trial scene entirely. The release of Barabbas is a "Roman custom" in Mark, a "Jewish custom" in John. Between the four evangelists, Jesus speaks three different last lines from the cross. And the resurrection stories vary even more.
The evangelists wrote some forty to seventy years after Jesus's execution. Their literary problems are compounded by historical ones: it is difficult to reconstruct, from their stories, why Jesus was crucified at all. If the priests in Jerusalem had wanted him dead, Jesus could have been privately murdered or killed offstage. If the priests had wanted him killed but were constrained from arranging this themselves, they could have asked Pilate to do the job. If the Roman prefect had simply been doing a favor for the priests, he could easily have arranged Jesus's death by any of the considerable means at his disposal (assassination, murder in prison, and so on).

The fact that Jesus was publicly executed by the method of crucifixion can only mean that Rome wanted him dead: Rome alone had the sovereign authority to crucify. Moreover, the point of a public execution, as opposed to a private murder, was to communicate a message. Crucifixion itself implies that Pilate was concerned about sedition. Jesus's death on the cross was Pilate's way of telling Jerusalem's Jews, who had gathered in the holy city for the paschal holiday, to desist from any thought of rebellion. The Gospel writers, each in his own way, introduce priestly initiative to apologize for Roman fiat, and the evidence suggests that the priests must have been somehow involved. But the historical fact behind the Passion narratives--Jesus's death on a cross--points to a primarily Roman agenda.
...
The script, when we got it, shocked us. Nothing of Gibson's published remarks, or of Fulco's and Gibson's private assurances, had prepared us for what we saw. Each scholar, independent of the others, wrote his or her own comments on the document. We then boiled them down, bulleted our points, and made the whole discussion easy to digest. The first section of our report explained the historical connection between passion plays and the slaughter of European Jews, the dress rehearsals for the Shoah. Then we summarized our responses to the script. We pinpointed its historical errors and--again, since Gibson has so trumpeted his own Catholicism--its deviations from magisterial principles of biblical interpretation. We concluded with general recommendations for certain changes in the script. Four short appendices--two historical, two directly script-related--traversed this same terrain from different directions. A final appendix provided excerpts from official Catholic teaching.Receiving criticism is never easy. As teachers and as scholars, who regularly give and get criticism, we knew this. We also knew that we were asking Gibson to revise his script substantially. We knew that we were working against his enthusiasm, his utter lack of knowledge, and his investment of time and money. We pinned our hopes on his avowed interest in historicity, on his evident willingness to hear what we had to say, and on his decency. In retrospect, we also functioned with a naivete that is peculiar to educators: the belief that, once an error is made plain, a person will prefer the truth.

You guessed it. The historians' report wasn't used.

That script--and, on the evidence, the film--presents neither a true rendition of the Gospel stories nor a historically accurate account of what could have happened in Jerusalem, on Passover, when Pilate was prefect and Caiaphas was high priest. Instead Gibson will apparently release what Christopher Noxon, in his article for the Times, had correctly described already in March: "a big-budget dramatization of key points of traditionalist theology." The true historical framing of Gibson's script is neither early first-century Judea (where Jesus of Nazareth died) nor the late first-century Mediterranean diaspora (where the evangelists composed their Gospels). It is post-medieval Roman Catholic Europe.

A quick summary of the first century setting is available from the Journal of Religion and Society, here.
The problem with purporting historical accuracy is that such an assertion promotes a sense of right/wrong and us/them. Further, it diminishes a sense of vulnerability going into a discussion of both the historical and spiritual aspects of the event.
For believers (and agnostics), the Truth and meaning of Jesus' passion is beyond a notion of visual accuracy anyway. Historical truth mixes with the broader sense of Truth that is absolute--and the batter is a personal concoction. Thus, my complaint with Gibson's vision is not the vision- it is the assertion of it being someting other than a vision. While Gibson seems to acknowledge this (he did so on Diane Sawyer), he contradicts himself (as seen above- asserting the attempt to get at the true happenings). The film should be advertised as a vision. Rather, it is being advertised as History.

More:
Some more info is here, and here.
Here is the Communitarian response. (one has a right to say damaging things, but why?)