An Ingenious Fantasy by a Fantasy Genius.

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 2006)

"Munich" is not about Munich. Nor is it about events which followed the massacre of Israeli athletes. It is about Steven Spielberg's ego. And how far into audacious he can drive it without becoming Oliver Stone.
This movie's tagline boasts, "The world was watching in 1972 as 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. This is the story of what happened next." Well, not exactly. It's what author George Jonas, screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, and film-maker Steven Spielberg *think* happened next.
"Munich" opens with a brutally-graphic hostage-taking sequence; Palestinian guerrilla group Black September killing and cudgeling the Israeli barracks into submission; news programs worldwide replaying that famous footage of the masked terrorist on the balcony we all remember watching obliviously as kids.
But before this sequence  four glib words: INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS - simultaneously endowing the movie with *faux* import whilst granting Spielberg "artistic license"  in other words, granting him the impunity to lie off the hook. The source material for this film solely being Jonas' self-admittedly uncorroborated book ("Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team"), makes this movie as much a fantasy as "Raiders Of The Lost Ark."
As Lew Wallace's decorative details in "Ben-Hur: A Tale of The Christ" (1880) achieved "fact" status simply through their compelling documentation in a powerful work of art, (even though the supposed Christian source tome, the King James Bible, is devoid of those details), it is only a matter of time before Spielberg's fiction will be regarded as doctrine if no further documentation of these events is made. (I doubt anyone will remember Michael Anderson's "Sword Of Gideon" in 1986  lesser movie, from same book.)
Eric Bana (still trim, taut and Troy-riffic from his last feature) is Avner, a Jewish family man and Mossad agent, called upon by Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Mier (Lynn Cohen) to lead a covert team in blood-revenge for the Munich massacre. Much is made over Mier's rationalization of morality  every "Munich" reviewer revels in flaunting her line - yet Mier only verbalizes (euphemistically, at best) how every individual behaves in every situation they encounter  by "negotiating compromises with their own values", i.e. using "circumstantial morality". There is *no* Kantian "outside morality"; it is *all* Nietzschean nihilism. Truth cuts to cure. Was it not blood retribution that George W. Bush called for (admittedly less articulately) in retaliation against September 2001's terrorist attacks? Did not America rally behind him like maniacal rednecks out for Middle Eastern blood?
Where was your morality then, Christians?
More intriguing than morality conundrums is the mindset that would allow a person to pawn themselves out to a government who admit openly that they will deny your existence - and probably try to make you *truly* non-existent  simply for performing a duty for your country. (Maybe the government stance on anyone sociopathic enough to accept their "uncivilized" assignments in the first place, is to summarily excise those unbalanced personalities from society.) Whether the vengeance squad questioned the morality of their actions is simply "writer's speculation", and is a storytelling staple akin to anthropomorphizing animals: to add dramatic flesh to the plot and to better identify with the characters  but can people who enter into such one-way self-sacrifices be understood or "humanized" at all?
Avner's team, four misfits from various middle-class walks of life, includes Robert the toymaker-turned-bombmaker (Mathieu Kassovitz), who bears a disturbing resemblance to Arnold Horshack, and who pulls the short straw to perform the first execution with Avner. In a flustered scene, their hesitancy at pulling the triggers whilst facing their target - questioning the target insistently with no defining answers - illustrates that even with purchased "intelligence information", Avner still has deep-rooted doubts as to whether their targets are the actual terrorists. But again, we must ask: when the original Mossad agent dictated his tale to George Jonas, did he merely add this trait to his personality to humanize himself? Or did Jonas add this element to elicit sympathy for the titular "heroes" exacting revenge - for without this hesitancy in killing, wouldn't that make them as evil as the terrorists they were executing?
Avner's operatives complete 5 of the 11 killings before the movie  and, we presume, the piecemeal intel the real-life assassins had to work with - runs out of steam. Munich's powerful performances, masterful cinematography and direction are tempered by its slipshod conclusion, which leaves no resolution to the storyline (supposedly "true", so left dangling and expecting forgiveness), and a hundred rhetorical questions in its wake: does retaliation benefit economically or politically?; how does a retaliatory individual or nation return to their former steady state?; will Arnold Horshack ever graduate?...
Having wiped the term "politically incorrect" from his vernacular after "Jaws", "revenge killing" would seem outside the Spielberg canon  but as long as both predators and prey in "Munich" sport indeterminate Middle Eastern accents, Spielberg could rest assured that ruffled feathers would only belong to pundits unimportant to the funding and distribution of the film. Minority groups could whine over unfair depictions, but their placarding of theaters and seeking of reparations would only lend impetus to the film in the western-dominated avenues where it is slated to reap its income.
Anyway, after the bloodlust directed at all Middle Easterners after the 9/11 debacle (in such an arbitrarily juvenile manner that Public Service Announcements had to be aired actually describing the ideological, religious and national differences between foreigners of Middle Eastern descent), how much does White America *really* care about Arab nations assailing each other's jugulars - in a world INSPIRED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG?
(Movie Maniacs, visit: www.poffysmoviemania.com)