This uses standard meaning later Spielberg techniques. Despite his vaunted cinematic storyboarding technique, all the emotional content here is spoken. All the emotional reference is off screen. There are violent acts, but these seen deliberately bloodless, like an Indiana Jones movie would have then, something abstract to talk about. The intended effect was to haunt by the reality that punches through the rationalization. The reality here never gets a chance because its all so movieworld.
That's the problem. He wants to make a film that resonates because it hurts, because it ties knots in us. He just cannot. Its still just a script.
Consider the last scenes. These are powerfully written. There are a dozen other filmmakers who could have made them work. We've been through an entire story to set up the haunting ambivalence in our hero. He is finally able to be with his wife and as he makes love to her, the only think he can see are the hostage deaths not fully shown until this moment, charmed into their horror by human touch.
This is followed by her gently caressing the face of her man, accepting all that has come before. If I read this by a good writer, I would be crippled for weeks. But see how Steven has rendered it. All the pieces are there but the cinematic machine isn't assembled.
We have gone all this time, and been set up so well for nothing. I am reminded of "Monster's Ball," which is constructed the same way. Its value is all in the very end, where we have Berre sitting on a stoop in a state of bewildered acquiescence.
This could have been more. It was far less, a remote poster. Good script. I intend to read it and imagine the film that could have been.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements. After so many fun Spielberg films in the early s, the latter half of the decade saw his return to serious dramas. The beginning of the s is no exception. Much like , Spielberg had room for sci-fi and a serious drama. Though in this case, both films also deal with the subject of terrorism.
Spielberg directed both films a few years following the tragedy of September 11th. In the case of Munich , the film explores the covert operation that followed the massacre at the Olympic games. It has, however, been attacked. Because the files are still classified, the filmmaker makes a number of creative liberties. Mossad agent Avner Kaufman Erica Bana is selected for a covert operation to assassinate the 11 people involved with the massacre.
Because Israel must have plausible deniability, Kaufman must resign from his official position within the agency. Off the books, Ephraim Geoffrey Rush handles Avner and the team. A ferocious air attack struck at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but that could not be enough. With Golda Meir's consent, it was decided to hunt down and assassinate any Palestinian who had survived or been implicated in the planning of the Munich massacre.
Special squads were recruited from Mossad and other organisations to carry out this 'Operation Wrath of God'. They could travel and kill anywhere in the world, by any means.
The illegality of this was obvious. But who did international law belong to? Once again - so many Israelis saw it - Jews had been led to their death in Germany while the Gentile world did nothing to save them.
Munich is the story of a small team sent out to find and to kill. It is the tale of what happens to them physically and morally. Several in this close band of brothers lose their lives and their erratic bomb-maker beautifully played by Mathieu Kassovitz eventually makes a terminal mistake.
All of them with one exception - Steve, a ruthless South African Jew acted by Daniel Craig - develop anxieties about what they are doing and what sort of human beings they are becoming. Nobody is more affected than Avner Eric Bana , the young intelligence officer who is their leader. He comes from a harsh, loveless background. Born in Israel, son of a father he never knew, he was consigned as an infant to collective upbringing on a kibbutz.
He has grown up mistrustful, a bleak loner who finds it hard to show his feelings and who only begins to discover his own emotions through marriage to the wise and tender Daphna Ayelet Zorer.
His obedience to the state is at first unthinking. But as 'Wrath of God' unfolds, cracks appear. He finds it harder and harder to deal with the growing doubts of his comrades, who are unnerved by the collateral suffering and chaos caused by their killings. Avner never openly admits to such doubts, but they are breeding inside him, too, and pushing him steadily towards breakdown.
Avner as a character is mostly imaginary. Apart from the opening at the Olympics and recurrent flashbacks to the scenes at Furstenfeldbruck, Munich is not tied to historical facts - less so than Spielberg was in Schindler's List. There was, indeed, an 'Operation Wrath of God', although the Israelis did not call it that, and its purpose was to go out in the wake of Munich and kill. But that is about as far as this film travels with ascertainable fact, which is thin on the ground. The Israeli authorities remain unwilling to discuss the operation, still less to name the men and women who took part in it.
It may even be the case that 'Wrath of God' is still going on. The last known killing in the series, the murder of Atef Bseiso in Paris, was as recent as , and one of the Olympic gunmen, Jamal al Gashey, is apparently still alive. So is Abu Daoud, once the leader of Black September. An unknown gunman, probably Israeli, fired five bullets into him in a Warsaw hotel in , but he survived. Spielberg adopted the figure of Avner from Vengeance by George Jonas, an earlier venture into the 'Wrath of God' story published as a book in Jonas used a source who claimed to be Avner.
But the Israelis strongly deny that the original of Avner played any important part in the mission. Other leaks suggest that the team leader was a middle-aged man. Simon Reeve's book One Day in September, published to go with Kevin Macdonald's documentary film, claims that he was a year-old man known as 'Mike' who was already the head of Mossad's operational department.
And the film itself? It's a one-eyed giant of a movie. It has fearful power. Its enormous noise and unsurpassable effects made a hard-boiled preview audience cower the night I saw it.
Spielberg seems to rage, as he tries to make you know what a bomb really does when it explodes in a busy hotel or what bullets do to a body. There was some of that rage in Saving Private Ryan, but Munich is more deadly, more selective, in what it decides you have to see.
Sometimes, it is too much. To watch what happens when a naked young woman is executed with small-calibre bullets is, in the end, humiliating for the watcher. Who do you take me for? But in other scenes, Spielberg's greed for reality serves truth and his story. For example, anyone who has talked to a political killer knows that every action goes wrong in a slight or a massive way. I have listened to IRA men remembering a minutely prepared ambush in Derry, when a 'volunteer' stepped round the corner to fire at the point man of a British patrol and, as he squeezed the trigger, a little girl jumped out of a door in front of him her head was blown apart.
I witnessed an attempt, one night in Malaya, to kill a man suspected of passing food to guerrillas through a village fence. The man escaped, but a hut was set on fire and an innocent old man and his wife burned to death. The film has deep love for Israel, and contains a heartfelt moment when a mother reminds her son why the state had to be founded: "We had to take it because no one would ever give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth at last.
Yet his film questions Israel's policy of swift and full retribution for every attack. It concludes that although nine of the 11 were eventually eliminated, they were replaced and replaced again by men even more dangerous, while the terrorists responded with even more deaths. What was accomplished? The movie is based upon a book by George Jonas, a Hungarian freedom fighter, now a conservative Toronto political writer, who has been an acquaintance for 25 years.
I thought to ask him what he thought of Spielberg's view of his material, but I didn't. I wanted to review the movie as an interested but not expert outsider, sharing with most of the film's audience not a great deal more knowledge than the film supplies.
Those who know more, who know everything, are often the wrong ones to consult about a film based on fact. The task of the director is to transmute fact into emotions and beliefs -- and beliefs, we need to be reminded, are beliefs precisely because they are not facts.
Eric Bana stars as Avner, a former bodyguard to Meir, who is made leader of the secret revenge squadron. He and his men are paid off the books, have no official existence, and are handled by a go-between named Ephraim Geoffrey Rush. Why it is necessary to deny their existence is not quite explained by the film, since they are clearly carrying out Israeli policy and Israel wants that known; they even use bombs instead of bullets to generate more dramatic publicity.
Avner is assigned only four teammates: Robert Mathieu Kassovitz , a toymaker, expert at disarming bombs, now asked to build them; Carl Ciaran Hinds , who removes the evidence after every action; Steve Daniel Craig , the trigger man, and Hans Hanns Zischler , who can forge letters and documents.
They travel with assumed names and false passports, and discover the whereabouts of many of their targets by paying bounties to a shadowy Frenchman named Louis Mathieu Amalric.
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