Munich

Last Friday, I, jarcca, Hannu and Mikko went to see Steven Spielberg's newest masterwork, München. Munich, for you umlautless English-speakers. I find it a difficult movie to write a review about. It was long and complicated, and I probably should see it again just to be sure I didn't miss anything.


It's a good movie, and it took a lot of balls to make it in this day and age. I felt it stayed objective and neutral in its depiction of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I am probably correct since the Israeli are saying it was clearly pro-Palestine and the Palestinians are saying it was pro-Israel. Apparently, a film critic on BBC World News said the movie was too impartial and failed to make a point by refusing to take a side. I think the critic probably had political baggage of his own. The film also illustrates well the reasons for my distaste of reading movie reviews. With a movie like Munich, they tend to degenerate into politically motivated frothing that ends up telling us more about the critic's own personality disorder than about the movie. My favourite was the one that referred to screenwriter Tony Kushner's earlier work Angels in America as "homosexual propaganda".

It was a gritty, realistic, violent movie. While I am sure Spielberg took certain liberties with both history and the book Vengeance the movie was based on (which in itself has been criticised for inaccuracy), the portrayal of events, people, and violence looks, feels, and sounds real. This is not a movie for the squeamish, by the way. No bloodless Hollywood gunshots or bullets propelling people through the air here. People die in messy and unpleasant ways. Guns are loud. Especially in an underground parking lot. Bombs don't go off in big, showy gasoline explosions. There's one complaint here, though: the horrible 70's sideburns. Some things just need to be buried for all eternity and stricken from the records.

But you musn't make the mistake of thinking this is an action movie. There's gunplay and violence, but it is secondary to the character examination of the Mossad killers as they begin to doubt the righteousness of their cause and the grim work begins to fray their sanity, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict, portrayed as two sides of the same coin.

Munich is not a subtle film. During its nearly three hours, it quite adeptly and forcibly drives home the points it is trying to make, especially about Avner's (Eric Bana, aka The Hulk, aka Hector of Troy) character development from a loving husband and father into the paranoid wreck his mission makes him.

The acting work is solid all around, but Michael Lonsdale's (aka Hugo Drax) French gun merchant and Geoffrey Rush's (aka Captain Barbossa) Mossad boss have a way of truly stealing the scene whenever they're about. Of course, the only one they have a scene to steal from is Bana, who seems to be at his best when alone. I would've liked to see more of the intra-party interaction among the Israeli assassins. Carl (Ciarán Hinds, aka Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Stealth Chin Man) and Steve (aka Daniel Craig, aka the next James Bond) deserved more screen time. The movie could also have done with a bit more depiction of the squad's work as a team. Correspondingly, some of Avner's paranoid raving toward the end could've been cut. The movie's pacing began to suffer after the setting shifted into Brooklyn.


I seem to be doing this a lot lately, but... five stars out of five.

Next movie lined up seems to be The New World, yet another take on the tale of Pocahontas. Might be good. We shall see.