No Easy Answers to Brutal Questions Can Be Found In Munich

Back in 2005, Steven Spielberg delivered two motion pictures that managed to crystallize different aspects of how 9/11 impacted America. The first, War Of The Worlds, was a harrowing motion picture that managed to capture just what it was like to be an ordinary American citizen that suddenly found themselves thrust into the middle of an attack larger than anything they could have imagined. Six months after War Of The Worlds, Spielberg's second directorial effort of the year would arrive in the form of Munich, which paralleled real-life events from the 1970's to the morally shady (at best) the American government was responding to the 9/11 attacks.


The real-life event from the 1970's Munich depicts stems from a 1972 attack on Israeli Olympic athletes who are killed by Palestinian terrorists. This shocks the country of Israel to its core and its leader hires Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) to lead four other men into Europe to track down and kill eleven men that the government claims are behind the attacks. Kaufman must leave his pregnant wife behind in order to fulfill this mission, but he goes along with it and begins to work alongside the likes of Steve (Daniel Craig) and Carl (Ciaran Hinds) as they attempt to find their eleven targets and issue violent justice against them.

As they mark off names on their checklist though, being surrounded by all this morally shaky government-sanctioned violence begins to take its toll on the individual members. It isn't long before it just the more paranoid Carl whose expressing concerns with their mission, though Kaufman himself becomes more and more immersed in the world of exacting violent vengeance once the assignment becomes personal to him. All the while they're taking out targets, a question lingers over these five men's heads; is this the right way to go about exacting justice, even in the face of an indescribably atrocity?

For a man whom many still like to associate with strictly making treacly family fare, Spielberg seems pretty adept at directing screenplays (Munich's was penned by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth) that delve into topical tough questions and then refuses to give easy tidy answers to those questions. Here, the main characters of Munich are grappling with how much of their own humanity they're willing to sacrifice in order to get the primal vengeance they want after going through an atrocity. Their own pain and suffering that informs this feeling is given plenty of depth, especially in an opening scene showing numerous people of Israeli descent around the world witnessing in horror the Olympic athlete hostage situation via TV newscasts.

From the get-go, the pain this must have caused for millions across the planet is made clear. From there though, the government responds to this in a morally shaky way, as they want to bypass the court systems all together and just send Aaron and his men to go kill 11 people involved with the Munich massacre. Neither Aaron nor the audience are given proof for the involvement of these individuals, Aaron and his men are just told to follow orders and eliminate these individuals. The Judge and the jury have been thrown out, all that remains is the executioner. As said above, this is meant to be a direct parallel to how the U.S. eschewed its own court systems in trying to track down information on Al-Qaeda in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (a phenomenon that was brilliantly chronicled in the excellent documentary Taxi To The Dark Side).

Characters like Steve may feel like some bloodthirsty revenge is just what the doctor ordered, but at what price does this kind of vengeance come at? Have you eschewed your own humanity in order to fight inhumane atrocities? It's a compelling question and one the characters of Munich grapple with, to varying degrees or another, in riveting fashion as the screenplay humanizes why the likes of Steve would want to get such gruesome revenge but also questioning the long-term morality quandaries such solutions provide. It's all thoroughly fascinating to watch and Munich is, thankfully, just as thoughtful on a visual level as it is in regards to its writing.

The way Munich films its various death scenes certainly reinforces how the entire movie is not trying to make the actions of Aaron look like some form of violent wish fulfillment. Their very first assassination has Aaron and one of his comrades visibly shaking as they pull the trigger, demonstrating that these are normal guys, not hardened mercenaries, carrying out these gruesome sentences. A similar level of realism permeates the rest of the features depiction of violence while those moments and the entirety of the motion picture are shot by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who delivers plenty of memorable imagery and those beams of bright light he's so fond of in his work here.

As for Steven Spielberg's direction itself, it remains thoroughly polished and commanding and I like the new bits of camerawork trickery that sneak in here that I haven't seen in other works in his filmography. Notably, there's this repeated use of slow zoom-ins on either Aaron and his men covertly tracking a target or on the target himself that reminded me of how Taxi Driver frequently used a similar zoom-in trick to highlight Travis Bickle watching someone from afar. In both movies, the goal is to visually demonstrate a character hiding out in plan sight and it works quite well in Munich, especially in contrast to some more grandiose camerawork that appears throughout the movie.

Spielberg also gets uniformly strong performances out of the cast, with Eric Bana turning in terrific tortured work as Aaron while Ciaran Hinds is particularly memorable as the morally concerned member of Aaron's group. The actors playing Aaron and his four associates all have strong chemistry together too, with some of their scenes together effectively evoking the sort of back-and-forth dialogue rhythms you might find in a particularly grim heist movie. The five lead actors all turn out to be mighty well-equipped to handle the darker questions Munich ponders to such noteworthy success making this yet another grim but exceptional motion picture that can be found in Steven Spielberg's work at the dawn of the 21st century which is one of the patches of his career I find to be the most fascinating.