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Film review by Colin Fraser

MUNICH

munich
A hit squad is sent to kill those involved with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. score

5
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1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz

Director
Steven Spielberg

Screenwriter
Tony Kushner, Eric Roth

Country
USA

Rating / Running Time
MA / 170 minutes

Australian Release
January 2006

Official Site




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"There is no peace at the end of this." Attesting to the futility of revenge murder, it’s a statement as true of Mossad’s mission as it is of contemporary adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the heart of Spielberg’s account of Israeli athletes slain at the Munich Olympics – a notion that vengeance does not reap reward. Accordingly his film has been slated by Palestinians, Israelis and neo-conservatives alike who find unwelcome apology where they look for accountability.

Compressing the essence of the award-winning documentary One Day in September, Munich is part action-thriller as it tells the story of a covert Israeli operation to assassinate those behind the 1972 outrage. It is a grim, tightly wound story that opens in a superbly edited frenzy which the rest of the film, as with Saving Private Ryan, is unable to match.

Flashbacks inform the present as squad-leader Eric Bana unleashes a bloodbath of revenge. It’s complicated because the men he and his group target refuse to fit stereotype. Since they don’t behave like monsters, but like artists, parents and idealists who regard their cause as righteous, should they be killed? Prime Minister Golda Meir thinks so, declaring with her opponent’s rhetoric that “to get peace, we must show them we’re strong”..

What Munich makes clear is that short-sighted revenge breeds its own insanity. As Bana’s team are picked off, his escalating paranoia underlines this point. Is Munich an audacious apology for Palestinian terrorism or Israel’s forceful vengeance? In fact, the audacity is to challenge the very notion of retaliation. If only more filmmakers were courageous enough to bring these ideas into mainstream cinema.

// COLIN FRASER