(5 votes, average: 2.6 out of 5)
Loading …Rent Movie.com movie reviews presents Munich movie review a 2006 film starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and directed by Steven Spielberg Based on the true story of the Black September aftermath, about the five men chosen to eliminate the ones responsible for that fateful day. During the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes are taken hostage and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. In retaliation, the Israeli government recruits a group of Mossad agents to track down and execute those responsible for the attack. At its core, Munich is a straightforward thriller. Based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, it’s built on a relatively stock movie premise, the revenge plot: innocent people are killed, the bad guys got away with it, and someone has to make them pay. But director Steven Spielberg uses that as a starting point to delve into complex ethical questions about the cyclic nature of revenge and the moral price of violence. The movie starts with a rush. The opening portrays the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes by PLO terrorists at the 1972 Olympics with scenes as heart-stopping and terrifying as the best of any horror movie. After the tragic incident is over and several of the terrorists have gone free, the Israeli government of Golda Meir recruits Avner (Eric Bana) to lead a team of paid-off-the-book agents to hunt down those responsible throughout Europe, and eliminate them one-by-one (in reality, there were several teams). It’s physically and emotionally messy work, and conflicts between Avner and his team’s handler, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), over information Avner doesn’t want to provide only make things harder. Soon the work starts to take its toll on Avner, and the deeper moral questions of right and wrong come into play, especially as it becomes clear that Avner is being hunted in return, and that his family’s safety may be in jeopardy. By all rights, Munich should be an unqualified success–it has gripping subject matter relevant to current events; it was co-written by one of America’s greatest living playwrights (Tony Kushner, Angels in America) and an accomplished screenwriter (Eric Roth); it stars an appealing and likeable actor in Eric Bana; and it was helmed by Steven Spielberg, of all people. While it certainly is a great movie, it falls just short of the immense heights such talent should propel it to. This is due more to some questionable plot devices than anything else (such as the contrived use of a family of French informants to locate the terrorists). But while certain aspects ring hollow, the movie as a whole is a profound accomplishment, despite being only “inspired by true events,” and not factually based on them. From the ferocious beginning to the unforgettable closing shot, Munich works on a visceral level while making a poignant plea for peace, and issuing an unmistakable warning about the destructive cycle of terror and revenge. As one of the characters intones, “There is no peace at the end of this.” –Daniel Vancini
Comment by Daniel Jolley “darkgenius”
# January 1, 2007,
I’m not a big fan of “inspired by true events” films, mainly because it can be impossible to distinguish truth from dramatic license at any given moment, but Munich represents the genre at its best. It’s an important movie because the events of this story lie beneath the surface for those of us who are too young to have actually watched the drama play out back in the summer of 1972. We hear references to it every four years during the Summer Olympics and think about how awful it must have been, but I don’t think I ever read or heard the whole story - especially Israel’s actions in response to the kidnapping and murder of eleven of their Olympic athletes in Munich. The Israeli government’s determination to mete out justice to the terrorists responsible for the plot easily lend themselves to questions on ethics, morals, and the like - and this aspect of the story really becomes the centerpiece of this motion picture.
The Munich massacre is one of the real lynchpins in the history of Islamic terrorism. When a group of Palestinian terrorists calling themselves Black September (and aligned with Yassir Arafat) infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, held eleven Israeli athletes hostage, and eventually slaughtered them all in the midst of an incompetent German rescue attempt, the Palestinians succeeded in attracting world attention to their cause. Germany soon handed the terrorists another major victory, cowardly releasing the three terrorists arrested (the others were killed) for the crime in acquiescence to the demands of other terrorists (hijackers in this case). Seeing that no justice would be forthcoming in European courts, Golda Meir gave a green light to a daring plan to kill the eleven most prominent planners of the massacre. This is the dramatized story of five men who gave up their own identities to serve their country in Operation Wrath of God.
The film centers around the team leader, Avner (Eric Bana), and the emotional effect this operation had on him as the mission advanced from one target to another. The whole group of Mossad agents was something of a motley crew, as none of them had the kind of qualifications I would expect of assassins charged with such a dramatic mission. Director Stephen Spielberg did a fantastic job of generating real tension in the moments leading up to each assassination attempt, and then made each hit as violently realistic as possible. Still, I do think the plot has some shortcomings. Early on in particular, I sometimes missed a connection between one scene and another; for example, I’m still a little hazy on exactly how Avner struck up his relationship with his main informer. Likewise, I have to believe it could never be so surprisingly easy to gain access to a target’s residence in order to set up a given hit.
At two hours and forty-five minutes, some will say that Munich is too long and that it drags in spots, and I can see some viewers questioning the nature of the film’s final twenty minutes or so. Those later scenes are very important, though, as they basically transform the film from a suspenseful action flick to a deep and almost philosophical examination of good and evil, personal responsibility, ethics, and the like. When you’re an assassin, you just don’t put everything you’ve seen and done behind you after the fact. Avner is truly haunted by his own actions, seeking some kind of assurance that he had done the right thing. The whole presentation manages to magically walk a line between the competing ideologies of the Palestinians and the Israelis, asking tough questions of each side and examining events from both perspectives. Whereas an Oliver Stone would have politicized this story up to its eyeballs, Spielberg keeps the film surprisingly objective in its presentation.
Besides a grim reminder that terrorism is by no means a new phenomenon, Munich finds ready application to the lively debates of the present day. The questions surrounding this story are the same kinds of questions being asked today in Western society (partly because we’ve let this cancer of the body politic fester for decades). That is what makes this film especially important.