Munich (2005)
Dreamworks DVD (region 1)
d. Steven Spielberg; pr. Kathleen Kennedy, Barry Mendel, Colin Wilson, Steven Spielberg; scr. Tony Kushner, Eric Roth; book. George Jonas; ph. Janusz Kaminski; m. John Williams; ed. Michael Kahn; cast. Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu Amalric, Michael Lonsdale, Matthew Kassovitz (164 mins)
Following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, a secret squad of Israeli intelligence operatives is trained and ordered to hunt down and execute the terrorists responsible. The mission, and its ethically problematic nature, gradually takes a personal toll on those involved.
Munich is a film about how to deal with terrorism: specifically about using the means of terrorism to combat terrorists – bringing the fight to their level on their terms. Following 9-11, this was the agenda announced by former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Although Munich examines this perspective, it does so from history – hoping to find in the lessons of historical anti-terrorism something of relevance. Terrorist cinema was off-limits on American screens immediately after 9-11 although first criticisms of Bush’s handling of the War on Terror emerged in 2004 in the documentary Fahrenheit 9-11 and the thriller The Manchurian Candidate, both concerned with living in a state of fear propelled by terrorist threats. Munich is effectively the first mainstream terrorist film to emerge post 9-11 and it is intriguing thus that it look to the recent past to delineate its tale of fighting terror with terror: the wave of terrorists films in 2007 would contemporize these issues.
Director Steven Spielberg said of Munich that it was: “(a)n attempt to look at policies Israel shares with the rest of the world and to understand why a country feels its best defense against a certain kind of violence is counter-violence. And we try to understand this as filmmakers through empathy.” Not an argument in favour of non-response, Spielberg hopes to draw attention to the moral problematics of such responses as possibly what will bedevil humankind in the War on Terror: the ethical quagmire of fighting terrorist violence with violence and inhumane treatment in return. Munich begins with a recap of the Munich Olympics terror incident – itself previously dramatized in 21 Hours at Munich and the subject of the exhilarating documentary One Day in September – and the subsequent events dramatized in this film concerning Israel’s covert anti-terror retaliations also informed the telemovie Sword of Gideon.
Israeli national pride and moral self-righteousness informs the decision to pursue the terrorist planners and leaders and eliminate them through targeted assassinations: hence, legitimacy for reprisal being a dominant concern for Israeli authorities concerned with maintaining civilized codes of conduct. Thus, Golda Meir’s pronouncement upon deciding that peace is not at present a viable option with the Palestinians concludes that “every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” In light of Cheney’s comment about the US now needing to go into dark terrain to fight the Al Qaeda enemy, and the wave of films examining the moral repercussions of Cheney’s directive in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the Golda Meir statement here is telling.
The logistics of a systematic counter-terrorist operation are depicted in Munich in involving detail but it is the surrounding ethical dilemma which transforms the material of a terrorist thriller into an examination of morality in a terrorist war. Posing questions, Spielberg invests the terrorist film with a weighty moral burden, reclaiming the genre from its pre 9-11 escapist-sensationalist mentality and making it the prime genre for the socio-political criticism and assessment of War on Terror issues. In so doing, Munich builds from the paranoid War on Terror fantasy of the previous year’s The Manchurian Candidate remake to seek a balance of socio-political analysis and genre thrill, although the excitements of the terrorist film as a genre can no longer be separated from the morality of terrorism and counter-terrorism as a struggle which affects the very definition of contemporary civilization. The terrorists lined up for assassination are also treated humanely by Spielberg, always a humanist who seeks to avoid caricature in his films, making the human toll of the terrorism / counter-terrorism cycle all the more tragic, and the means of such a cycle all the more terrifying, no matter which side may claim righteous justification and validation.
From phone triggered bombs in Europe on street-level anti-terror excursions in Beirut, Munich follows its special anti-terror team on their every mission, exploring their group dynamics and creating a fascinating tableaux of the people involved in the counter-terrorist intelligence scene. Although Spielberg is concerned over the problematic morality of the Israeli action, he is excited by the peripheral figures – the rogue Frenchmen who can find information about anyone but refuse to deal with governments – and the truly amoral world which lurks within and around supposedly righteous government action. In the context of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism that underlies this particular terror war, those refusing allegiance to any nation become true power brokers. In Munich, the unaligned have access to unlimited information: as if nationalism itself imposes a system of priorities upon the way “civilization” conducts itself – this sub-textual look at nationalism, patriotism and civilization is frequently found in the terrorist genre, though rarely with such technical skill, dramatic prowess and moral questioning found in Spielberg’s definitive take on the genre. It’s that Nationalist impulse behind the script’s many references to “home”.
There is even a wry humour here, as an assigned “safe house” makes for a tense stand-off when three terrorists converge there seeking safety: the irony being that now the Israeli can talk to a PLO terrorist face to face (albeit undercover) and begin to empathize with the enemy he has been also blowing up, under governmental authority. It’s that empathy with the “terrorist” that further problematizes Munich’s discussion of the ethics of counter-terrorism: but that is Spielberg’s intent, humanist empathy. Although Munich is a period film, its insistence on the ethics of waging war against terrorists announces a distinctly post 9-11 take on the terrorist film genre, which pre 9-11 had descended into caricaturish escapist popular entertainment in such as Collateral Damage and The Sum of All Fears.
As Dick Cheney revealed to the world America’s readiness to plumb depths it hadn’t in the name of the War on Terror against an inhuman, dehumanized “enemy combatant”, director Spielberg looks to Israel’s decision to do the same against the Palestinians in the early 1970s and in his examination of that Israeli response is a complex cautionary tale of reciprocity, and the final image of the New York City skyline with the World Trade Center intact brings this material to subtle post 9-11 relevance: from Palestine to the War on Terror, what lessons are there to be learned? Munich knows the questions needed to be asked to begin to find out.
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