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At the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, 11 Israeli athletes are killed by the Palestinian terror group “Black September”. Mossad indoor service agent Avner Kauffmann (Eric Bana) is officially dismissed from the Mossad and gets the inofficial order to assassinate eleven Palestinians supposedly responsible for the murders. Avner leaves his pregnant woman to go on a mission that may lead him away from home for years, and about which he can speak to nobody.
With a team of four equally inexperienced men, Steve (Daniel Craig), Carl (Ciarán Hinds), Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), and Hans (Hanns Zischler) he starts hunting down his targets, and with each successful assassination, they grow more into their new selfs as assassins – and get ever more estranged from their former lifes, their families, and themselves, while making closer contact to the enemy as they ever imagined.

This is Steven Spielberg’s most “unspielbergian” film so far. No sentimentalities, no final carthasis, no heros. MUNICH is even more powerful than SCHINDLER’S LIST because it doesn’t have villains and victims and doesn’t take sides. It’s just people who do what their country demands them to do and what they think they have to do, and losing something invaluable on their way – their very soul.
Is it a political film? Yes, because it covers real events and asks fundamental questions that are as current today as they were 30 years ago. How far can or must a government go to protect it’s people? Is there a justification for killing people? And does it do any good? The film doesn’t give the answers.
But much more than a political film, it’s a human film. It shows how thin the layer of civilization is, how easily and impalpable it is removed, and what happens to people once this layer is removed – and it ain’t pretty. MUNICH is everything that Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE should have been and couldn’t achieve.
Uncomfortable, unnerving, animating to think about politics current and past, the world, and life itself – essential viewing.

Munich Movie Trailer

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 4:36 pm and is filed under 5-star-movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.