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Munich Movie Review

Munich is a 2005 historical thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Eric Bana. It’s an overlong, but surprisingly sophisticated movie.

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“We are supposed to be righteous“

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A terrorist organization kills eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. However, a team of five men is assigned the task of killing the terrorists as revenge. This movie proved to be highly controversial back when it came out. It did receive five Oscar nominations and strong reviews, but many were angered by its even-handed portrayal of both parties involved.

But I personally really admire Spielberg for being as level-headed and as unbiased as he could have possibly been. For a Jewish director to not make a pro-Israel movie definitely was courageous, and now I respect him on a whole new level after seeing this incredibly touchy subject handled so delicately.

What he did was make us understand both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has only grown worse from the release of this film, making it even more relevant today. Israel wants to bring back their homeland, but Palestine wants to defend itself, and seeing that other side from Hollywood was unexpected and powerful. The best moments here are the examinations of both sides and how wrong they both were in their unethical treatment of their enemy.

While Munich is superbly scripted and quite smart, the thriller elements did not appeal to me as much. They are fine, but repetitive, and the movie surely did not need to go through each of the assassinations. That was unnecessary and it made the film quite repetitive and too extended in its runtime. It was too long and my interest evaporated in the second half because of it.

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Munich is well shot, though a bit too dark. The performances are uniformly strong with Bana delivering one of his best acting works to date, but the characterization overall was very mediocre as he did not have enough time to properly develop this huge cast of personalities. That was a problem that prevented me from appreciating the movie more, but overall this still ranks as one of the smartest and best crafted of the director’s period pieces.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich has a ridiculously long runtime, some padding issues and very mediocre characterization, but the director’s delicate, sophisticated and balanced treatment of a tricky subject matter made me appreciate him on a whole new level. It was wonderful seeing such a difficult subject being depicted in an unbiased manner as it takes no sides and every conversation was quite insightful. As a result, it’s one of Spielberg’s best period pieces.

My Rating – 4