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*** Official MUNICH Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

Justin_S

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I had no problem whatsoever with the sex scene. I like that even making love to his wife can't distract him from his fears and his actions in the assassination squad. He's so far gone.

I think Bana is truly brilliant in this film. The emotional heights he reaches really impressed me. He does so well without even saying a word too. The sequence where he's desperately looking around his room for some type of bomb, finally slumping down in the closet a miserable mess is especially powerful. As I said in the review thread, towards the end of the film, he really looks like he's aged several years since the film's beginning. The phone scene with his wife and daughter is great as well, and my eyes actually got a little watery just seeing his emotion in that scene.
 

Chad R

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This was my first thought, but he's not remembering his actions in the assassination squad, he's "remembering" events he didn't witness or take part. It appears as though Munich is still bothering him, and that his actions didn't purge him of any anger towards the terrorists. Perhaps it's validation that he's unsure his targets were actually involved in Munich, and that's the fears he's manifesting. Or perhaps, it's that no amount of retalitaion, even by those who had a hand in it, will heal wounds for Israel. To me, this scene is the closest Spielberg comes to offering "an answer." That answer is that violence is not the only or an absolute solution.
 

AaronMan

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Incredible movie. First rate entertainment. It really is amazing that Spielberg can pull films like this off in so little time. The cinematography on display here is brilliant. There are so many master shots, its ridiculous.

This movie is designed to get people to discuss the issue, not spell it out for you. I do not expect Spielberg to fit in every detail of one of the most controversial issues in recent human history in 3 hours. He has got me thinking though. This film makes me want to learn more about it. I can't fault him for that. Just my opinion.
 

Justin_S

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I wholeheartedly agree, as these are the fears I meant. These fears along with his time in the squad continuously haunt him, and this is why I also had no problem with the flashbacks to Munich taking place during the sex scene. They were there for more of a reason than to just show them, and I thought it made for one of the film's most powerful scenes. His desperate questioning of Rush in the final scene further shows his dismay about whether or not the squad helped matters at all thanks to the better replacements, or if they even killed the proper people. It had to make him feel incredibly helpless in the grand scheme of things.
 

Robert_Z

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Yes I agree this movie was well done, but in the same way a master chef could prepare a fruitcake or meatloaf to perfection.

At the end of the day, it is still fruitcake or meatloaf. Bleh...

I was disappointed in this film and my girlfriend and I almost walked out twice. The movie dragged after a while.

Oh well, I hope Syriana is better!
 

Patrick Sun

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I got a bit bored by the repetitiveness as the movie wore on as well. It could have lost 15 minutes of running time without losing much in terms of story or impact because the film does lose some steam as it gets into the final act.

Everytime I saw Daniel Craig on screen, I kept wondering how his James Bond would stack up against the former ones. Plus his character of Steve just didn't have much to offer. I didn't like the threadbare characterizations given to the cronies, and Avner's personal story just wasn't all that interesting nor compelling to me, either.

I found the intercutting of the final siege at the Munich airport with Avner's troubled sex life to be less effective to demonstrate the cost of losing his peace of mind and body and spirit for undergoing his mission. That was probably the most heavy-handed portion of Spielberg's direction for this film that didn't pay off for me.
 

Kyle_D

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Saw this yesterday. I liked it but I didn't put it on my top 10.

Things I liked a lot:

-The hits themselves were staged quite well, especially the hit with the bed bomb.

-Everything with Michael Lonsdale and the French Informants.

-The final scene between Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush, with the final pan to reveal the WTC in the background.

-Spielberg didn't wuss out on the violence. It takes a lot to genuinely make me squirm at a movie nowadays and this got to me, as violence should in a movie like this.

-With the exception of the scene where the litle girl picks up the telephone, I never felt the usual Spielberg manipulation. Yes, he gives the Palestinians the opportunity to speak their peace, but I don't call that manipulation. I call that letting both sides have their say and I give credit to Spielberg just for having the balls to make a movie like this at this time. He doesn't give you any easy answers and leaves the audience to mull the issue over themselves.

Things I didn't like so much:

-It's an "and then" movie. Almost every scene is good or great, but they're stung together with so little connective tissue that it felt like one damn thing after another. Overall, I came away feeling the whole was far less than the sum of its parts and that the whole thing was akin to the second act of Saving Private Ryan.

-I never really felt any attachment to any of the characters. Just didn't.

-The scene where the team takes out the Dutch assassin. Let's see, I'm going to enter the home of a trained assassin known to be targeting me and I'm going to take a weapon that takes 30 seconds to prepare before it's ready to fire. Furthermore, I'm going to wait to prepare it until I'm standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER so I look like a fumbling idiot and give her a chance to take me out.

-That final sex scene is awful, and almost laughable when Eric Bana whips his hair up in slow motion, causing sweat to fly everywhere; I expect that from an 80s music video, not Steven Spielberg. It completely hijacks the emotional climax of the film. I get what Spielberg was getting at. Throughout the film, the flashbacks to Munich serve as a reminder to Avner as to why he was doing his job. They're not his memories, they're his justification. Now he is trying to justify what he did and it haunts him even during sex. Unfortunately, Spielberg obviously isn't comfortable with the scene and it just doesn't work.
 

Tino

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From the Clapping thread:


O.K. Crawdaddy, here we are in the discussion thread.

Now why did you applaud during the scene when the Dutchwoman was assasinated?

I agree with the other members who feel that was one of the most powerful, sad and tragic scenes in the film and cannot imagine anyone applauding during it.

Tell us why you are disturbed.;)
 

Robert Crawford

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I didn't have any sympathy for her, since she was a contract killer who used her gender to get close to her targets. She killed a member of their team by shooting him in the mouth and blowing his brains out the back of his head.





Crawdaddy
 

Haggai

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OK, finally got to see the movie last night. Endless rambling on numerous subjects to follow.

Overall, I thought it was a very good movie, and especially strong as a suspense thriller. The violence was chillingly brutal in its realism, as others have mentioned, particularly in the flashbacks to the Munich massacre itself, as well as the scenes with the hotel bed bomb and the killing of the Dutch female assassin. The cast is excellent, with Bana being quite believable to me as a native-born Israeli.

Somewhat to my surprise, the politically-oriented speechifying in several scenes is almost uniformly terrific. Aside from Robert's "we're supposed to be righteous" bit, which seemed forced to me, there are several outstanding dialogue passages that represent larger currents of political thought with great accuracy and compelling drama. The Palestinian fighter's conversation with Avner expresses several sentiments about their collective national narrative that almost all Palestinians would agree with, even those who oppose Ali's devotion to violence and terror. The scene with Avner's mother talking about the importance of Israel as a homeland for the Jews is, likewise, a great dramatic expression of much of what constitutes the justification for Israel's existence in the minds of its citizens and supporters. (Although a minor odd detail in that scene is the multiple menorahs visible in her home: Ephraim has said in the scene just before it that it's the middle of June, and Hanukah never comes THAT early!)

A couple of problems for me: I agree very much with Kyle_D's criticism of the sex scene at the end and the killing of the Dutch woman. However, I did think that vengenance killing scene was still very powerful and disturbing. On the other hand, a criticism that I don't think anyone here has voiced yet is the credibility of Carl's actually taking the bait of the female assassin's trap. I did not believe for a minute that an apparently experienced and cautious guy like him would have fallen for that scheme, allowing some mysterious woman to get him alone and vulnerable in his own hotel room. The jumpy and callow Robert--as he says, he's a sapper who doesn't even have any real bomb-making experience, and certainly not any real experience as a spy--might have been more credible as a target who would fall for her, but not Carl.

The question of the overall "message" of the movie, if there is one, is also something that I don't think Spielberg quite resolved satisfactorily. I understand that he's more interested in raising questions than in answering them in this movie, and I think it's a valid artistic choice that he mostly achieves successfully. But there's still the fact that we experience the events of the film through Avner's perspective, so we're naturally inclined to feel that his beliefs or conclusions at the end of the line is what the movie is really "all about." I think it's less ambiguous than what Spielberg might have hoped for. It is a difficult thing to pull off, but at least a couple of points could have been made to raise more doubts in Avner's mind. He pleads with Ephraim that they should be arresting the terrorists, "like Eichmann," instead of assassinating them. But this is rather naive on his part, and Ephraim didn't point out the obvious: how are you going to arrest someone who travels with tons of bodyguards, like the guy who even had KGB agents watching him? How are you going to arrest Ali Hassan Salameh, with his bodyguards AND his CIA protection? Avner's seen this stuff first hand, he should understand that there's sometimes a choice between knocking the guy off or just letting him go about his business. A tough dilemma, yes, but not one with many alternatives.

Now, on to some touchier issues. Chris links to this article in Slate, by Time magazine's Aaron Klein. Chris also expresses a couple of the article's criticims in his own words, which I'll quote here:



OK, so the informants were largely other Palestinians, not rogue French operatives. But don't some of the same issues still apply? You have to wonder if your source is reliable, and whether he's playing both sides, potentially setting you up, etc. Avner worries about this with his contacts, but Mossad operatives obviously had to worry about this as well with their real-life Palestinian informers. The film chooses to express some of the real shades of gray of this sort of work through the French characters, and I think it succeeds completely here, thanks largely to the great Michel Lonsdale. If the real-life issues can be brought to life that well dramatically, I'm willing to accept some historical switching of the identities of who was providing that information.

This is probably already the longest post ever, but let me conclude with a little fact that's probably easy to miss in the midst of the film: in the attack on the terrorists in Lebanon, the leader of the Israeli military commando squad introduces himself to Avner. He was Ehud Barak, who later became the Prime Minister of Israel, from mid '99 to early '01. In the film, he's dressed as a woman, as some of the commandos were in real life. Barak went in drag because he's pretty short, and as such would be more believable as a woman at a glance, or from far away. And in the film, when they're getting into their female disguises, one of the Israelis says (in Hebrew) "It's cute, isn't it?" I got a nice chuckle from that.
 

mattCR

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Robert-

You're not alone. I "cheered" a little when that happened. I had no sympathy for her and felt like, amongst many characters, her crime most deserved what came to her.
 

Quentin

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My problem with the theme/message(s) of the film is that as there are (IMO) two films here, there are also two messages. The theme/message of the thriller is twofold - one, that killing changes you and will eventually catch up to you. This is well handled by Avner asking questions, forming doubts, and his increasing paranoia as well as the hit team eventually becoming hunted themselves. The other is about honor/loyalty. This is covered by the Papa storyline and also by Avner's paranoia. It all works together VERY well.

The other theme/message(s) of the film is covered by the political portion of the film - this is the murky message for two reasons: 1, it is murky! Yes, he thinks the killing is bad all around, but he tries to deliver a balanced message of both sides views to make the argument that no one should be killing anyone and you can easily get lost in THAT debate...and 2, he delivers it all awkwardly through speechifying and the clumsy flashbacks.
 

Haggai

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Except for the last sex scene, I thought the flashbacks were woven in pretty well. And while the speechifying was maybe a bit more obvious than it had to be, I didn't think it was by much. The set-up with the PLO guy seemed OK to me--the showdown between the Israeli team and the other terrorists, unsuspectingly "booked" into the same room, and then the little "bonding" between Steve and one of the Arabs as they agreed on Al Green. I thought that was enough to justify the transition into the Avner/Ali discussion scene.
 

Justin_S

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I was glad to see the Dutch woman get what was coming to her, especially considering Carl was one of my favorite characters, but I still found the scene to be quite unnerving despite all that. Hans coming in with the pop gun shot right to the head seemed especially brutal even though it would've been worse had they left her to slowly die. I thought it was one of the most effective scenes in the film.
 

Patrick Sun

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I couldn't believe Louis would have "overbooked" the safehouse" room. How many terrorist units were running around Europe at that time period? That was just a little too "convenient" scriptwriting.
 

Michael Elliott

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I guess the film had the opposite effect on me compared to what others are writing. I really can't say I was "cheering" for the main group to kill off the other side because wasn't the point of the film saying both sides were in the wrong? People talk about cheering at the females spies death but why not cheer for her killing the guy? I really don't see the need in cheering for either side since both sides were killing for no reason. Both sides were villains so which ones lived and which ones died really didn't matter in the end.
 

Haggai

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Mike, I don't think the point of the movie is that both sides were wrong, that's oversimplifying to a great extent. You really don't think we were supposed to identify with the guys in the hit squad and with what they were trying to accomplish? The point of the movie was to explore the personal costs and effects of the violent response to terrorism. I think it could have been more clear in what it was trying to say (or not say), but I don't think it was drawing a simple equivalence between the Israeli agents and the terrorists.
 

Tim Glover

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My initial NY Eve plans fell through so since I was already in the Dallas area, I thought I would search around to see where the limited release of Munich was playing. Found it and took it in.

I was a bit mislead by my own expectations at first. This film is NOT about actual murdering at the '72 Olympics, but rather about Israel's response to it.

Suddenly, I remembered that "vengence" was the book that inspired this film and then my misled expecations fell by the way side.

Munich is one powerful film. It's a rare film experience that has such a grittiness to it and realness, that it places you there in ways you don't expect or predict. I won't talk alot about the politically meanings too much except to say it did make me think alot about the aftermath of 911 and Iraq. Not to say I think that America was/is wrong for their re-actions-----it's just for the first time I really began to think about it on a very deep level.

The acting is top notch. The actor who played "Carl" was terrific and deserves an Oscar nom. I was the most surprised by Eric Bana. Wow. Didn't expect Bana to carry this film like he did. His performance was flawless and compelling, and rich. Maybe the best performance by an actor this year.

Spielberg, again, at the top of his game. This is not a pretty film with warm and fuzzies. Gritty, tight, and most reflective.

Reflective is probably the best description I can give. Really made think about things I tend to deny or "think about later"...

The score is effective without calling too much attention to itself.

It's a difficult film at times, and not always easy to sit through, but it's one of the years best, if not the best of 2005.
 

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