Review of Munich (2005) by Craiga. — 08 Feb 2006

I was surprised at how balanced it was. Speilberg isn't messing around or being lenient on either side. He attacks both Israel and the Palestinians equally and at times really goes to town. I imagine that both sides will be furious with him for some time to come.

Some of the conversations in Munich are pretty high-IQ analyses of the situtation and definitely the most un-Hollywood thing i've seen for a while. I think it humanises (and dehumanises) both sides in equal measure.

There's a great scene where Eric Bana has a conversation on the balcony with the 'target' he's about to blow up. It gives a personality to somebody who will next be seen as a selection of body parts.

Oh yeah, its very violent. Regarding 'crucial facts', the 'truth' doesn't really come into it since this is a *film* of a *novel* which is an *account* of how things *might* have happened.

And its not an account of Munich itself (see/read One Day in September). For example, I only felt moved to object to one crashingly obvious bias: one of the final flashbacks to Munich painted the events at the airport in a very black and white "and then the Palestinians shot all the hostages" way.

By all accounts the stand off at the airport was very confused and we'll never really know how the hostages died (they could have been simply in the crossfire). Otherwise, the portrayal of both sides is pretty fair.

The film basically says that vengence is just another form of terrorism and reprisal killings just breed more terror. It doesn't shy away from heavily suggesting that Israel killed people just to make itself feel better rather than because they had anything to do with Munich (cf: US invasion of Afghanistan in response to Sept 11th).

In the same way that Black September's response to exile and oppression was to turn to terror, Israel's response to that very terror was to turn to terrorism, ad infinatum... no end ever.