Great Story, Great Action

Rating: 7/10 (31 December 2005)

This is very intense movie with great action, great suspense, fast pacing, wonderful cinematography, excellent use of flashback and color, and a wonderfully panoramic sweep from Israel to Europe to Lebanon to Brooklyn.
The gradual evolution of Avnar is convincing and troubling ... and chilling. If anyone wants to see what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can look like, Avnar in the later part of this movie shows a fairly good picture of same. As a working psychotherapist with a specialization in trauma-related disorders, I can attest that the portrayal of Avnar in this regard reflects an authentic representation of trauma-driven mental and behavioral processes.
There are moral ambiguities that are raised again and again. The moral ambiguity of the "twilight services" I guess date back to John Le Carre's spy novels. One thing I myself liked about this movie, though, was that while it does dabble a little in "moral equivalence", on the whole this was not pursued as relentlessly as in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", for example.
I myself came away with a clear sense that Munich, for example, involved a right and wrong side, as far as it goes: there were perpetrators and they were not the Israeli athletes but the Black September terrorists.
Now this is, I'll admit, in contrast to what seems to be the general view of the movie: that Spielberg, following the Kushner book on which the movie is based, was indeed trying to paint the Israelis as being as much terrorists as the Black Septembrists of Munich. And I'll admit that, especially in the conversations between Avnar and his case manager, we see some real "back and forth" that depicts the difficulties of the path that carried Avnar ... and Israel ... forward after Munich.
Yet there is never any question, in my own reaction to the movie, that raison d'etat here is closely connected with Israel's .. and Avnar's ... deep sense that they are fighting for their Home. The assignments of Avnar and his team are (I think) always recognized as, at one level Justified: these are terrorists who slaughtered in Munich and elsewhere, after all; and yet these are humans, people, with families, with lives that the film depicts as startlingly "normal." It is naturally tempting to view the Terrorist as somehow inhuman; this movie makes clear that the Terrorist is a Terrorist *and* entirely human.
The final ... or near-final, I can't recall ... scenescape of a New York skyline in which the Twin Towers are clearly recognizable adds for me a special sense of poignancy. The Towers were destroyed by Terrorists ... when? 9/11/2001? And I see this scene in December 2005. There's sort of a sense of both déjà vu (in the movie ... set in 1973-74) and flashback (for the viewer of the movie in 2005) that is remarkably moving from my angle.
All in all, it seems that Spielberg was indeed trying to make a political "statement" in this movie. But if you can ignore that and focus on this as a great flick with plenty of action and intrigue, hey, I think it's a great addition to this genre.