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Munich
Ah, a serious Spielberg movie. Guaranteed quality or blatant award fishing? A little bit of both if you ask me.
Munich is a worthy story - maybe not strong enough for an Oscar and about half an hour too long - but definitely worth watching. The insight into the killers' lives is both interesting and a mite disturbing. Definitely leave the kids at home or better still, rent it when it comes out on DVD - this is indeed one of the few films that might even work better on the small screen. I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: - lots of people get blown up, but terrorism's simply not cool. Marie-Josée Croze shows all her ample features, but not in a very "wahey" kind of way. To enjoy this film you should be: probably late twenties or older, with a serious side.
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Your commentsThe comments printed here are not necessarily the views of Forwardcharm!
Forget Jimbo's technical analyses of the backdrops, this film is worth watching for the sheer tension and action (all the more engaging as it actually happened), and then re-watching for the bits of dialogue that inevitably you miss first time round. Michael Lonsdale is credible in his role, as he operated the safe house in 'Ronin'. There is a particularly touching scene when Eric Bana phones his wife and baby daughter from a hotel room. Maybe it's just me, but I find that films are bad at depicting long periods of time – months and years – passing. That's why it's hard to believe the Mossad killers questioning their motives later on, because really their whining stems from their assassination campaign being so drawn out. But the pace is kept up well, even near the end it's still edge-of-the-seat stuff, you just don't know who will get blown up or shot next. Very much a movie for blokes, with all the violence and gadgets.
Mossad was brought into being 10 years before I was born by David Ben Gurion. The PLO were founded in 1964 (3 years after I was born), with Yasser Arafat becoming chairman of it's Executive Committee. The state of Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem during 1967. Not surprisingly there is a bit of anomosity between Israel and Palastine. These small facts could have been made known at the start of the film, unfortunatelky they were ommitted.
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During the 1972 Munich Olympics, a group of terrorists from a Palestinian group calling themselves Black September
executed 11 Israeli olympic athletes. Munich is the story of the Israeli government's retaliation by recruiting a
band of Mossad agents to find and kill those responsible. Sounds like a bundle of laughs, doesn't it? It's Oscar time,
and this is Steven Spielberg's bid. He's in with a shot, too, as Munich is a well crafted and nicely thought out movie.
Eric Bana (Hulk and Hector in 
The story is told with a reasonable, but not really sufficient degree of impartiality. Coming as a newcomer to the story,
it seems odd that we don't learn why Black September killed the athletes in the first place - but maybe that's supposed
to be irrelevant. Maybe we're supposed to see that the inexorable escalation of the retaliations makes the origins of
the conflict insignificant compared to the end result. We're not preached at, though, and no solution is offered -
we merely see what a painful state of affairs it is. The killers themselves live tortured lives for their chosen
profession, and it's a credit to the storytelling that we're actually made to feel sympathetic towards them, rather than
the contempt and disgust that we would naturally feel in real life.
Now the peculiar part. The movie is set in the 70s, and Spielberg has quite deliberately created a 70s film look, with
a slight fuzziness to the images and a drabness in the colours. This has a quite unexpected side effect of making
everything look flat, especially the backgrounds. The cinema effect - that of having a 20-foot image - exacerbates this
effect and makes most of the backgrounds look computer-generated. Of course, maybe they are, but scenes of walking
along a promenade with a beach in the background needn't be generated by computer, and scenes with the Eiffel Tower in the
background too - but I'm sure they were, they have that flat flickery computer look to them. It's most disconcerting
and somewhat distracting, as I found myself watching the background and the period cars to see which ones were real
and which virtual; I was reminded of
