A very well-made, thrilling movie whose message is a little messed up

Rating: 7/10 (8 January 2006)

Having seen Munich yesterday myself and wondering how its politics would be, I was very surprised. In the film, while Spielberg showed the killings as gruesome, he focused more on the personal elements of Avner and the terrorists' lives. I expected that the movie would be outright against the "revenge," and it was a pleasant surprise to me that the film treated it as something justified but a little too far. The politics I found pretty clear, though, was that Israel is supposedly "sleazy" and "careless." However, the film was INSPIRED by real events, so most of it could all be seen as playing into Avner's personal life.
What the film failed to grasp was that Israeli (and even some American) anti-terror missions are both vengeful and preemptive, as assassination of these terrorists helped bring an end to years of terror, as shown in the news clips in Munich. Also, a small detail that was interesting was the terrorists always driving Mercedes Benzes.
It was a very good film, though, and to me showed what people who work to fight against terrorism must go through and their emotional breakdowns. It left me with mixed feelings about its politics and how truthful they were, although much of the movie wasn't actually true, but it also left me with one definite feeling: terror.