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Quoting Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, in the movie:

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

This very anticipated movie from internationally renowned American movie director Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) really had the potential to make him what Israelis call “an enemy of Israel”. Obviously, without sparing too much the spectators, Munich tells the story of the relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians at the time when the “terrorist organization” Black September killed eleven Israeli athletes in 1972 at the Olympic Games of Munich. Most of the things are shown through the eyes of Israelis, but this is not a movie that tells a story; it’s a nice work of art, adapted from the book Vengeance written by Canadian journalist George Jonas, that makes us think.

While glancing at the movie’s back cover, we can clearly see that the movie almost reaches three hours in terms of duration. That tells us that Steven Spielberg had so many things to say in this touching story about humanity and insanity. However, the main flaw of Steven Spielberg’s Munich is certainly its length. In fact, the movie often suffers from a slow pace at certain moments, because some scenes are just so useless since they don’t help us to understand Munich’s very simple story and that it doesn’t make it advance. Besides, Steven Spielberg has inserted slow moments in his movie in which the characters are just doing nothing important or saying nothing. All in all, it’s possible, in my opinion, to get through the movie even though its appreciation is a little bit marred by annoying long periods.

As you have probably seen it, Munich is just not an espionage movie that just follows an assassination team of the Mossad, the Israeli secret services. You will probably notice that one of the ways to fully appreciate Munich is to struggle in understanding the loss of innocence and humanity in the characters, whether they are Israelis or Palestinians. For instance, Avner Kaufman, the Israeli secret agent and head of the assassination team sent by the Mossad, is apparently going down into his inner hell as the time goes by during his mission. In fact, all the five members of the assassination team that we follow loses their humanity by feeling animated by the vengeance that they want to strike the eleven Palestinian terrorists of Black September with. Besides casting a glance at the physical and material damages that the Israelis have committed to the Palestinians, Steven Spielberg also gets interested to what is going on in some of the Palestinian terrorists’ mind by trying to give a few explanations to the Palestinian destructive and violent nationalism.

As one of the characters in the movie have said, some Palestinian terrorists, by trying hardly to make the world “hear their voice”, are not only obtaining the hatred from people around the world, but they’re also being regarded as animals in the world. This is only what you see on the surface, but the movie’s depth lies in Spielberg’s ability to explain how the Israeli government, since the end of the Second World War, have gradually transformed some Palestinian nationalists into bloodthirsty killers. As opposed to what we might believe, Munich doesn’t try to say who’s right or who’s wrong. However, behind some Palestinians’ resentment for Israelis, there are also sadness and a visceral fury caused by the loss of their country, or rather their home, in a land where’s there’s no future for them mostly because of the loss of good reasons to live and appreciate life. Despite being graphically hard to watch, Munich is a movie that shows empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians by showing them as what they truly are, which means human beings animated by feelings and desires, depending of the sides that they belong to without glorifying their respective endeavours, naturally.

One of the other ways to fully appreciate Munich at its full potential, despite its few flaws, is to try to decipher with great pleasure all the meanings hidden behind the well chosen cast impeccable performance that illustrates the appearance of inner demons at the contact of violence and anger. The characters’ psychological nuances don’t necessarily lie in what the characters explicitly show on the screen, but rather in their subtle feelings. Obviously, some will have the feelings that the leading characters are clearly one-dimensional, but that concealment of psychological multiplicity probably reveals, as the time goes by during the mission, the questions that are being raised in their mind and it also shows how each character is psychologically torn (to kill for Israel or not to kill for Israel) in the smouldering fire of action. Without revealing too much of the movie, you will certainly appreciate the performance of Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down), as Avner Kaufman, and Daniel Craig (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), as Steve, in their respective role of Israeli secret agents.

Finally, even though Munich is, at the first look, full of riveting action sequences, it is nonetheless a movie that obliges us to think about human condition and personal fate depending of the sides that we belong to. No heroism, no glorification, no minimization. These are great assets that makes Munich a movie that you must see in order to understand impartially the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority without turning a blind eye on what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians. Furthermore, even though the story is shown decidedly through the Israelis’ eyes, Munich doesn’t try to show them as victims of the Palestinians’ patriotic anger.

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