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Munich (film)

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Munich is an Academy Award-nominated 2005 film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. The movie is set after the 1972 Munich massacre and follows a Mossad squad, led by "Avner" (Eric Bana), which is ordered to track down and kill a list of 11 Black September members thought to be responsible for the Israeli athletes' murders.1 The extent to which the movie represents fact is a matter of debate. Spielberg himself refers to it as "historical fiction" saying it is inspired by actual events, specifically what became known as Operation Wrath of God.

The film was shot in various places around Malta [link] (which stands in for Israel, Cyprus, Athens and for Rome and Paris as well, in some scenes), in Budapest (standing in for London [link], Rome [link] and for the German airport of Fürstenfeldbruck [link]), Paris and New York[link].)

Contents

Plot

The film is based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Canadian journalist George Jonas, which in turn was based on the story of Yuval Aviv, who has claimed to have once been a Mossad agent. In the book, Aviv's story is told through a protagonist called "Avner". The Jonas book was first turned into a made-for-TV movie in 1986 called Sword of Gideon, starring Michael York and directed by Michael Anderson [link] [link].

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film commences with a depiction of the events of the Munich Massacre in 1972, which is then followed by a recreation of the news coverage and snippets of real footage.

Avner Kaufman, an Israeli-born office worker for Mossad of German descent, is summoned to become the leader of a five-member assassination squad to seek revenge for the Munich Massacre by tracking down and killing the planners responsible for the Black September terror attack. Since Avner is not a high ranking member of Mossad, he is made to sign a renunciation of any official relation to Mossad and made the leader of the group, which consists of Steve (the South African getaway driver), Hans (the German Jew document forger), Robert (a Belgian toy-maker turned bomb expert) and Carl (the "worrier" who cleans up after the others). They operate independent of the official structure of Mossad with no official ties between the squad and the Mossad or the Government of Israel. They receive their instructions and funds for their operations in U.S. dollars through two safe deposit boxes in a Swiss bank. Avner's exclusive point of contact is Ephraim, a middle aged officer of the Mossad.

To help track down the locations of the eleven Black September terrorists (who are dispersed around Europe and the Middle-East), Avner pays generously for help from a French informant named Louis.

The assassination locations include Rome, Cyprus, Paris, Beirut, Athens, and Hoorn.

The first assassination occurs after Avner meets with a former friend who has connections in the Red Army Faction. The group travels to Rome to hunt down a Palestinian translator, currently working as a humble poet. One scene features the man giving a little extra to a small market he regularly visits for food. As he is about to get into an apartment elevator, Avner and Robert come up behind him and ask him if he is indeed the person they think. The two hesitate, visibly nervous, but eventually shoot the man to death, who moments before his death attempted to get Avner to lower his pistol. After that, the group heads to Paris to kill another man. They install a phone bomb in his home, and just as they are about to detonate it, his daughter enters the apartment and the group calls off the bomb at the last second. After his daughter leaves, the group goes through with it, yet the bomb was far too weak. The man survives, but dies later in the hospital. The group heads to Cyprus to kill a KGB contact. After they install a bomb in his bed, Avner chooses to hold the room next to the target, whom he ends up befriending in a casual conversation on the hotel balconies. But shortly after, the man goes to his bed, which prompts Avner to give Robert the signal and he detonates the bomb, but this time it is more powerful than expected. Avner and the couple next door are wounded in the explosion. Avner's French contact, Louis, eventually gives the group information on three Palestinians hiding out in Beirut. Ephraim, the group's contact, refuses to allow them to go to an Arab country, but he finally relents, but says that the army must go as well. Avner knows that Louis will refuse to give him more info because of this. After going to Beirut, Steve and Avner meet up with roughly 20 Mossad agents, including future Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They penetrate the building, killing all three targets and a woman in the crossfire. They then engage the local police, killing them all and escaping.

Louis, as expected, is angry at Avner, and jacks up the prices on his information due to this. Avner receives information about the KGB contact's replacement. They head to Athens where Louis has found them a dingy apartment. In the night, the group hear footsteps outside. It turns out there are three PLO members who claim that Louis gave them the safehouse. The Jews pretend to be ETA, ANC and RAF members. Avner chats with the group's leader, Ali, about Israel and Palestine. Eventually the group goes to do the job. Robert plants a phosphorus bomb in the KGB contact's TV set. As the group rolls up, we see that Ali is in town to protect the man they are hunting. As Robert tries to detonate the bombs, they fail once again so Hans heads into the room with a grenade. He blows up the contact and barely makes it out alive. As a KGB agent is about to shoot him, Avner shoots the agent, saving Hans. Ali sees Avner and the two start firing at each other. Steve drives up to Avner, who jumps in the car. As they drive by, Carl shoots Ali to death.

Angry at Louis, Avner heads to France, but Louis is willing to sell information on Salameh. Louis tells Avner that Salameh is paid by the CIA to protect Americans, and he is in London to meet his contact. Avner asks Louis if the CIA knew about Munich, but Louis says the CIA didn't even know about Black September until the Munich Massacre. The group heads to London to kill Salameh, but they fail after Avner is interrupted by Americans whom he speculates may have been CIA agents pretending to be drunks. While they are there, Avner meets a temptress, who eventually takes Carl into bed. In the morning, Avner finds Carl dead with a bullet in his brain. The group then heads to Hoorn to kill the assassin, but Robert has a crisis of faith and decides to sit it out. The group tracks down the surprised assassin and kills her with zip guns concealed as bike pumps. When the group returns to London, Avner is becoming increasingly paranoid and begins sleeping in his closet. Steve wakes him up and tells him Hans is missing. They find him on a bench by the River Thames with a knife in his chest. Meanwhile, Robert is killed by a bomb in his workshop. Suicide or irony in the death may be implied, due to the movement of a toy ferris wheel immediately preceding the explosion. Louis suggests that many bomb-makers die in accidents.

Steve and Avner manage to track down Salameh in Spain, where they plan to shoot him with a sniper rifle. However, a guard walking by sees them, and they are forced to shoot him, alerting the other guards. The group barely escapes with their lives as they're shot at repeatedly. Later, the assassins are relieved of their duties. A disillusioned Avner goes to his new home in Brooklyn, where he becomes paranoid about his and his family's safety. He endures flashbacks of the Munich Massacre and comes to question the value of his mission. He makes waves in an Israel embassy in New York City, which prompts the attention of Ephraim to come to the United States and speak with Avner.

As the two walk alongside each other by the city river and clear up Avner's misunderstandings, Ephraim asks his friend one last time to rejoin the Mossad, but Avner rejects on principle. Avner asks his superior to come to his house to have dinner with his family, but Ephraim rejects. The movie's final shot concludes with Ephraim walking away from Avner, who in turn, walks into his own direction. The camera pans up to a shot of the New York City skyline, including the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

The movie has a post script, explaining the Munich mission and the outcome.

Spoilers end here.

Finance and reaction

The film garnered a 78% favorable rating from critics (per Rotten Tomatoes), though its "cream of the crop" rating was lower at 59%. It received a high 7.7 out of 10 from internet visitors to the IMDB. Roger Ebert praised the film [link] and placed it at #3 on his top ten list of 2005. James Berardinelli gave the film a good review[link]; it was the only movie in 2005 which he gave four stars, and he also put it on his Top 100 Films of All Time list. Rex Reed from New York Observer belongs to the group of critics who didn't like the movie: "With no heart, no ideology and not much intellectual debate, Munich is a big disappointment, and something of a bore." [link]

The film failed domestically, earning only $47,132,785 in the United States, about two thirds of the film's $75 million cost (estimated). However, the film did do relatively well internationally: as of March 15, 2006, the film has grossed $110,479,849 worldwide[link].

Awards and nominations

Steven Spielberg received a Best Director Golden Globe nomination, as well as a DGA nomination for Best Director. On January 31, 2006, the film received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Film Editing, Original Music Score (by John Williams), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director.

Controversies


Journalist Yossi Melman of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz has said that the book is "strewn with mistakes", adding that after a lawsuit identified Aviv as Avner, "investigative reports about him revealed that he represented himself as a Mossad agent even though he had never worked in the Mossad and certainly had not participated in operations to kill those involved in the athletes' murder. Aviv, as he emerged from these investigative reports, had a special fondness for conspiracy theories; it turned out that he was willing to hire out his services to anyone who was willing to pay, even to both sides of the same dispute" .


Multiple reviewers have criticized Spielberg for what they call his equating the Israeli assassins with the Palestinian terrorists. Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic, "... Worse, ‘Munich’ prefers a discussion of counter-terrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion". 


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Melman and other critics of the book and the film have said that the story's premise — that Israeli agents had second thoughts about their work — is not supported by interviews or public statements.


A retired head of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, Avi Dichter, likened Munich to a children's adventure story. "There is no comparison between what you see in the movie and how it works in reality", he said in an interview with Reuters.


In a Time Magazine cover story about the film on December 4, 2005, Spielberg said that the source of the film had had second thoughts about his actions. "There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating," Spielberg said. "It's bound to try a man's soul". Of the real Avner, Spielberg says, "I don’t think he will ever find peace".


Contrary criticisms of the film suggest that politics are warping critics' interpretations of the film. Some critics have claimed an Israeli bias in the movie, as many others complain of Palestinian bias. The review of the film on BBC World News accused the movie of being too impartial, being too balanced and refusing to take a side to the point where it had no clear message. Others have criticised the movie for painting the sense of duty of killing terrorists with a sympathetic brush.


However the film has had several defenders. Pulitzer Prize winning American film critic Roger Ebert defended the film in his review by stating that 'by not taking any sides, Spielberg has taken both sides'. Several of the film's defenders state that the film was never meant to offer truth but merely raise debate on the issues touched upon in the film and also to draw attention to today's events. Indeed James Berardinelli who named the film the best of 2005 stated that, Spielberg asks, but cannot answer, a key question: Is a war against terrorism winnable? We would like to think the answer is "yes". It would help us sleep better at night. But Munich points out a sobering truth: for every terrorist killed, there is another - possibly a worse one - waiting to take his place [link]. 


David Edelstein of Slate argued that, 'The Israeli government and many conservative and pro-Israeli commentators have lambasted the film for naiveté, for implying that governments should never retaliate. But an expression of uncertainty and disgust is not the same as one of outright denunciation. What Munich does say—and what I find irrefutable—is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective' [link].



Historicity



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Although a work of 'historical fiction', many actual events and figures from the early 1970s are depicted in the film. On the Israeli side Prime Minister Golda Meir has an important role in the film, and other military and political leaders such as Attorney General Meir Shamgar and Mossad chief Zvi Zamir also appear.  


The actual hostage-taking and massacre of the Israeli athletes goes for historical authenticity to the point of using Israeli actor Gur Weinberg, one month old in September 1972, to portray his father Moshe, the wrestling coach and first hostage killed. Unlike the earlier film, 21 Hours at Munich, the positioning of the Israeli hostages in the helicopters and the fact that all of them were shot is also historically accurate.


The named members of Black September, and their deaths are also mostly factual. Wael Zuaiter, a translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome was shot fourteen times in the lobby of his apartment 41 days after Munich. On December 8th  of that year Mahmoud Hamshiri, a senior PLO figure was killed in Paris by a bomb concealed in the table below his telephone. Others killed during this period include Mohammed Boudia, Basil al-Kubasi, Abad al-Chir, Zaid Muchassi, some of whose deaths are depicted in the film. Ali Hassan Salameh was also a real person, and a prominent member of Black September. He was killed by car bomb in Beirut in 1979 [link]. The commando raid in Beirut, known as Operation Spring of Youth, also occurred. This attack included future Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is portrayed by name in the film. The film does not mention the case of Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent man killed by the Israelis in Norway when they confused him with Salameh.


The methods used to hunt and kill the Black September members were, in real life, much more complicated and involved than portrayed in the film. For example, the tracking of the Black September cell members was achieved by the Mossad, not an un-named third party as in the film. Other distinctions from fact abound in this portrayal of the events surrounding "Operation Wrath of God".



Goofs



Cast




 Actor
 Role


 Eric Bana 
 Avner Kaufman


 Daniel Craig 
 Steve


 Ciarán Hinds 
 Carl


 Mathieu Kassovitz 
 Robert


 Hanns Zischler 
 Hans 


 Geoffrey Rush 
 Ephraim


 Michael Lonsdale 
 Papa


 Ayelet July Zurer 
 Daphna (Avner's Wife)


 Marie-Josée Croze 
 (Dutch killer) Jeanette


 Gila Almagor 
 Avner's Mother




Awards



Won





Nominations







See also





References





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