With Munich, director Steven Spielberg has birthed the darker sibling of his 1993 Holocaust epic, Schindler's List. Whereas the list of the former film's title concerned those lives to be saved, the list in this film is a tally of lives to be destroyed. Munich doesn't pretend for a moment to entertain such lofty notions of lifesaving; instead, its primary concern is with the cold, hard, self-destructive business of death.
The death-dealing involved focuses on the Israeli retaliation following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The episode, spliced and diced throughout the film in flashbacks, is the impetus for the main storyline, in which a team of five assassins hunts down a list of 11 Palestinian terrorists responsible for planning and executing the Munich operation.
The team, led by Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), operates under the utmost secrecy. They are not public citizens of Israel but shadow figures who flit in and out of numerous cities and countries, identified only by the bevy of false documents they carry, their only home the numerous safe houses and apartments from which they plan their operations.
In this respect, Munich is at its best when it works as a global espionage thriller, a stylistic homage to such '70s films as The French Connection. Our band of brothers hops from one location to another (each country shot through a different camera filter so that location titles become unnecessary) on their seemingly endless mission to wreak revenge and strike fear into anyone willing to kill Israelis. Booby-trapped phones and beds explode left and right, gun battles are waged in terrorist compounds and on city streets, secret informants both help and hinder, and the team itself soon becomes the target of assassination.
At one point in the film, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarks that, "We will show the world that killing Jews is an expensive enterprise." But Spielberg asks, "At what expense?" Avner, the figurehead of the film and a literal son of Israel (his father was a celebrated war hero), soon becomes enmeshed in his own private doubts and questions the business of political vengeance. Are the Israelis protecting themselves by killing those responsible for the Munich operation, or merely perpetuating an endless cycle of violence? Patriotism and certainty eventually give way to criticism and paranoia -- and the death list isn't even halfway finished.
There seem to be two modes of dialogue operating in this film: a dialogue of words and a dialogue of violence. We can either talk things through, as Avner and a PLO member do in the staircase of a safe house while "Let's Stay Together" plays in the background, or we can continue to retaliate and counter-retaliate with violence. Spielberg, ever the optimist, clearly vouches for the former solution. The violence in this film is quick, sudden and brutal.
The sequence in which Avner and a team of Israeli agents storm a compound in Beirut is a mixture of thrilling action and disturbing undertones, bearing an eerie resemblance to the storming of the Olympic compound at the opening of the film. Not to mention an assassination late in the film that, however justified, is utterly jarring in its sexual overtones and its execution (no pun intended).
As for any concrete solutions to the Middle East conflict, there aren't many to be found here. The film concludes with the bleakest ending to a Spielberg film in recent memory, in which no compromise is reached, no solution seen on the horizon. Instead, what we have is an exciting and entangled treatise on vengeance. If the saying "an eye for an eye" is the coda for the politics of revenge, then Munich shows us the trauma endured by those responsible for pulling someone's eye out by its bloody roots.
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