Aesthetics vs. realism

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2006)

I would like to comment on the cinematography of this picture. Although the clothes, cars, hotels and other requisites of the movie have shown to be quite accurate, I still felt that this picture was too aesthetical regarding the horrifying events that they depict. Take one scene, for instance: When the Palestinian terrorists make their way into the Israeli apartment and kill one of the Israelis you see his blood covering the wall and you see some scraps of wallpaper coming off the wall due to the bullets from the machine gun. So instead of showing the bullet-ridden corpse of the Israeli Spielberg chose to show a wallpaper full of blood and wholes. Why? Because he chose to display the murder of an Israeli in a way other than realistic. He chose to use a metaphor (a stylistic device) and not the actual death of a Israeli. I think that this is typical of all his movies. In the end, what most of his movies (even Schindler's list) come down to is this: They are nicely made popcorn movies and they have no real political impact. For the time being (as long as the film lasts) you are in the story but then again, once your out of the movie theater you realize that you still don't know more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The one scene were the conflict is really being discussed is when the Bana character talks to the Palestinian terrorist, but the conversation they have is so commonorgarden that you don't really feel for either of them. I watched a German documentary on the hijacking of the Landshut (1977) by Palestinian terrorists (Das Todesspiel, Heinrich Breloer) and this documentary provided a lot more information on terrorism and raison d'etat than Munich. It was a mixture of documentary and movie scenes and it included interviews of the people involved at the time (Helmut Schmidt, Ben Wischnewski and Jan-Carl Raspe, among others). In comparison, Munich is nothing more than an aesthetically pleasing film with some overwhelming action scenes and a handsome looking Eric Bana who looks like he got right out of the TROY gym. Synopsis: Spielberg turned a horrible event into a popcorn movie. He doesn't really care about the event, he just takes them and abuses them so as to make a suspenseful movie. In this, admittedly, he succeeds.