bad history and bad cinema

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2005)

Munich (2005) isn't Steven Spielberg's only movie about Jews, but it's by far his worst. Although Shindler's List (1193) turned Auschwitz into polish Disneyland and Israel into the Shoah's happy ending, Munich manages to make Mossad assassinations more painful for those who carry them out than their victims. Spielberg turns the idea that Palestinian guerrillas responded to the atrocities involved in expropriating their property in order to create the state of Israel into a of lame slogan only voiced by a confused "terrorist" named Ali (Omar Metwally). The movie starts with the events at the 1972 Olympics, effectively de- historicizing the attack and reifying the event according to our post 9-11 ideology of terrorism.
If one can usefully distinguish the film's "form" from what it's "about," the movie adds nothing to the cinema. It's filed with cliché hand-held work, imbecilic under-cranking to show tension or emotion, lazy rack focus shots solving the seemingly impossible riddle of conversations in long take, and bleach-bypass processing that was already played out and annoying in the late 1990s ( see for example three kings (Russell, 1999). When the mossad bomb maker starts to break down the first half of the scene is played out in silhouette against the bright white roof of a train station. Cliché as that image is, Spielberg and DP Janusz Kaminski don't even have the courage to maintain it for the whole scene, cutting to ordinary exposures for the rest of the conversation between the bomb maker (Mathieu Kossovitz) and Avner (Eric Bana). Spielberg and his editor Michael Kahn stoop to imitations of hitchcokian suspense throughout the film, most annoyingly when we wait for the Mossad team to blow up a Fatah member whose child returns to his apartment to fetch her mother's glasses as we cut back and forth between her trajectory, Kossovitz holding the detonator and Bana signaling the mossad team.
In short, both the narrative and film form make revolution inconceivable by enforcing trans- historical humanism and the lamely updated stylistics of poorly remembered 70s thrillers.