Rating summary
Movie | | 5.0 |
Video | | 4.5 |
Audio | | 5.0 |
Extras | | 3.5 |
Overall | | 4.5 |
Munich Blu-ray Movie Review
The Cost of Vengeance
Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 26, 2015
I vividly recall a conversation with a professional colleague when Steven Spielberg's Munich
played in theaters in the winter of 2006. Knowing that I was a film fan, he inquired whether I had
seen it and whether it was good. When I responded yes on both counts, he then asked, over and
over, without pausing for an answer, "Why should I see that? Why would I want to see that?"
Since he hadn't actually asked for a recommendation, I was startled by the question. It suddenly hit
me that he didn't really want to know about the film; he just wanted to
register his disgust at its very existence.
That conversation stayed with me, as Spielberg's fictional account of Israel's hunt for the
masterminds of the 1972 Summer Olympic massacre continued to enjoy mostly praise from
critics but was widely savaged by political commentators, many of whom focused on unlikely
details. (I finally quit reading the columnists after one found great significance in the fact that the
Mossad agent played by Daniel Craig had blond hair and blue eyes and talked about "Jewish
blood", thereby demonstrating, according to the column, that Spielberg was trying to portray the Israelis as Nazis.) As often
happens with a drama touching on issues that are still alive and hotly contested, partisans on all
sides view it through a filter—does it or doesn't it support my side?—while non-partisans just
want an escapist break from horrific headlines.
According to many reports, Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-author
of Munich's screenplay (with Eric Roth), initially resisted Spielberg's offer to adapt George
Jonas' book, Vengeance: The Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, because Kushner
didn't want his first movie assignment to be such a controversial project. Sure enough, Munich
prompted denunciation of Kushner as an "Israel-hater", and there were calls by some Jewish
organizations to boycott this film by the very same director who, just twelve years earlier, had
received universal acclaim for Schindler's List.
Ultimately, Munich was not one of Spielberg's more successful films,
despite the strong reviews.
Can Munich be seen differently today? I doubt it. All of the button-pushing issues that it raises
still push the same buttons; if anything, the buttons are bigger and a brighter shade of red. So
much depends on one's expectation for a dramatic work of fiction. Ideally, the dramatist's role is
to present every character from that character's point of view. In the famous quote from director
Jean Renoir, "everyone has his reasons", but presenting them in a drama doesn't mean treating
them as morally equivalent. It means making an imaginative leap to gain understanding of why
people do what they do. Drama doesn't offer solutions, and it doesn't serve as propaganda. At its
best—and Munich is very good drama—it provokes thought and may even lead to knowledge.
Munich opens with a sharp, shocking re-creation of the events that began in the early morning
hours of Sept. 5, 1972, when a group from the Black September faction of the PLO invaded the
Olympic Village and seized nine members of the Israeli Olympic team, killing two more in the process.
The mix of historical and recreated footage is so convincing that anyone who recalls watching
TV coverage at the time may experience deja vu, especially as editor Michael Kahn cuts in
reactions from viewers around the world. But
Munich holds back the full details of the terrorist
attack, so that the rest plays out in flashbacks, which are strategically placed to reflect the
growing spiritual disarray in the leader of the covert team assigned to find and kill eleven
terrorists identified by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, as those who planned the Olympic
massacre.
That leader, Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), is carefully selected for a mission personally approved
by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen). The decision to order assassinations does
not come easily. As the Prime Minister says, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate
compromises with its own values". Avner and the team of four commandos assigned to him by
his Mossad case officer, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), repeatedly find themselves struggling with
that negotiation, both within themselves and among each other, as they identify, stalk and
eliminate targets on their assigned list.
Avner's team reflects a diversity of age, background, nationality and temperament, which allows
a wide array of viewpoints and emotional reactions to be aired as they descend into the
increasingly shadowy world of covert missions. The bluff bonhomie of Israeli clean-up specialist
Carl (Ciarán Hinds) masks an awareness that the team's actions are a breed apart from normal
military action ("It's strange, isn't it, to think of oneself as an assassin?", he says on their first
meeting), while the gung-ho bloodthirstiness of South African driver Steve (Daniel Craig) gradually
loses its edge as the deaths add up. A killing that the team regards as necessary but isn't on their
list becomes the breaking point for both Belgian bomb maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and
Danish document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler).
But it is Avner on whom
Munich's many conflicting elements take their heaviest toll. The son of
estranged parents, routinely reminded that his father is a national hero and that he is a "sabra",
i.e. a child of Israeli parents, Avner begins his mission with utter conviction, even though it
means abandoning his pregnant wife, Daphna (Ayelet Zurer), and missing out on the early years
of their child's life. But when the mission finally ends, he is fearful for the safety of his family
(now relocated to America), having endangered so many other families. He also doubts the
efficacy of what the team accomplished. He finds Ephraim's reassurances glib and empty,
because Ephraim has not had to see and do what Avner has.
"Stop chasing the mice inside your skull!" Avner tells one of his team at one point, but he might
as well be talking to himself. The complexity of his moral quandaries is thrown into stark relief
by his encounters with a Godfather-like figure known only as "Papa" (Michael Lonsdale), who
represents a detachment from the world of political conflict in which Avner and his team are so
bloodily immersed. A former member of the French Resistance during World War II, Papa now
lives with his extended family on a remote farm in the French countryside, where he deals in
information, working primarily through his son, Louis (Mathieu Amalric). He despises all
governments, and his only loyalty is to family, which puts Papa in a position almost as conflicted
as Avner's. Because Papa admires Avner's loyalty to family, which, like Papa's, is rooted in the
soil of his native land, Papa actually prefers Avner to his own children, who share no such
loyalty, having been reared solely on mercenary values. Still, as Papa says to Avner in a revealing
moment (and to Louis' fury): "You could have been my son, but you're not. Remember that."
This essential nexus where land, loyalty and family intersect is crucial to the conflicts in
Munich,
and it is expressed directly by a Palestinian terrorist named Ali (Omar Metwally), whom Avner
encounters while undercover in Athens. It is probably this scene, more than any other, that has
fueled charges that
Munich justifies the PLO, but such charges have to overlook the increasingly
brutal depictions of the Olympic massacre in the film's three flashbacks, culminating in the final,
agonizing slaughter. These scenes serve as a constant reminder to the audience that the mission
on which Golda Meir sent Avner's team had a genuine justification. They also show, by their
placement, the steady toll taken by Avner's mission on his soul. The first flashback is Avner's
own imagining of the horror, as he works up his courage to the task at hand. The second occurs
in a dream, now that the terror he is avenging has penetrated his nightmares. The third occurs in
an intimate moment near the film's end (in a scene much commented upon at the time), as we
realize that the events of Munich have been absorbed into Avner's very flesh and blood.
Spielberg minimizes nothing, neither the terrorist attack itself nor the price paid by those who
struck back.
Lest all this sound like heavy going—or to echo my professional colleague, "Why should I want
to see
that?"—Spielberg remains a master storyteller, capable of maintaining suspense and
staging a taut action sequence with such apparent ease that his technique is almost invisible. The
hit squad's elaborately choreographed (and sometimes improvised) attacks on their targets, with
either bombs or bullets, are masterful set pieces, each with its own setup, rhythm and payoff, and
every one fits precisely within the film's larger architecture so that the roughly two hour, forty-minute running time never drags. Spielberg even
finds
moments of comedy in the least likely
places, like the Mossad officer who insists that Avner keep receipts, or the wonderful dinner
table scene when Ephraim insists that the team reveal their sources of information and they all
refuse. Such moments are essential against the increasingly grim tableau of violence, stealth and
ultimately paranoia, as the team itself becomes a target for assassination by . . . whom? As Papa
says: "We inhabit a world of intersecting secrecies, living and dying at the places where these
secrecies meet." By the end, Avner trusts no one except his wife and child.
Munich Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality
Spielberg's long-time collaborator, Janusz Kaminski, shot Munich, which, unlike most films
from this period, was finished photochemically rather than digitally. In the "Portrait of an Era"
featurette, Kaminski and Spielberg discuss the visual design, which involved a different color
palette for each city, achieved with a combination of filters and developing techniques. Universal
Home Video has created a new transfer for this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray release, which,
with a minor quibble or two, is stunning. The image is exceptionally sharp, detailed and realistic,
with the slightly gritty, documentary quality that Spielberg wanted for a "you are there" sense of
immediacy. The palettes for the various locales are readily identifiable, if one chooses to look for
them (they are meant to register subliminally), from the deep greens of Papa's farm to the sun-bleached outdoors of Israel, the blue tint of Beirut or
the slight desaturation of Paris. The
recreation of the events of the Olympic massacre blend so seamlessly with the historical TV
coverage that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Black levels and densities
look about as good as one can imagine they could be.
The only negative is some occasional slight aliasing. One can see it, for example, on the steps in
the opening when the PLO terrorists are trying to scale the fence into the Olympic compound. It
is possible (note that I say "possible") that this results from the application of some light
sharpening in some scenes, a practice for which Universal is well known, but the instances are
sufficiently fleeting that it is hard to be sure of the cause. If not for this minor issue, the image
would rate a perfect score.
The average bitrate is 27.16 Mbps, which is very good, especially given the letterbox bars and
many scenes of stillness and conversations. (Other scenes peak well into the thirties.)
Munich Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality
As discussed by sound designer Ben Burtt in the extras, Munich's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded on
Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, strives to be both realistic (in the authenticity of its sounds) and
expressive (in the way those sound are layered, emphasized, modified or sometimes isolated by
dropping out the environment). The various European cities where Avner and his team hunt
their targets have distinctive and active environments that come alive in the surround channels,
then sometimes go quiet as key moments occur. Period automobiles, airplanes, even telephone
dials make distinctive sounds. Gunfire and several powerful explosions rock the room. Even the
arrival of an elevator makes a distinctive impression (Burtt discusses this particular effect in
detail). As with every Spielberg film since at least Jurassic Park, there is hardly a moment
without some interesting sonic detail happening somewhere, and the Blu-ray's lossless track
reproduces it all.
None of this comes at the expense of the dialogue, which is cleanly reproduced with its multiple
accents and several subtitled languages. John Williams' beautifully elegiac score, which
incorporates the national anthem of Israel, underpins and sometimes soars above the aural mix
with a quiet authority.
Munich Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras
The extras have been ported over from Universal's 2006 "2-Disc Collector's Edition" DVD of
Munich, of which only a limited quantity was issued. The DVD set also included a small booklet of stills, but
the Blu-ray has no such paraphernalia.
- Introduction by Director Steven Spielberg (480i; 1.33:1; 4:31): This introduction by
the director appears as an option when "play" is selected and also appears under "Extras".
Spielberg discusses the fictional aspects of the story and his intentions in making the film.
It is clear that he is attempting to respond to many of the criticisms leveled at
Munich after its release.
- The Mission, The Team (480i; 1.33:1; 13:10): Producers Kathleen Kennedy and Barry
Mendel, screenwriter Tony Kushner, production designer Rick Carter and Spielberg
discuss the development of the script. Spielberg discusses the casting; additional
interviewees included Lynn Cohen, Ciarán Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Daniel Craig, Mathieu
Kassovitz, Eric Bana, Ayelet Zurer and Geoffrey Rush.
- Memories of the Event (480i; 1.33:1; 8:36): Punctuated by additional historical news
broadcasts, Spielberg, Kushner and others recount the events of September 5, 1972 and
their impact, especially on Israeli society.
- Portrait of an Era (480i; 1.33:1; 13:17): Spielberg and production designer Rick Carter
describe how Malta and Budapest became what Spielberg calls "backlots" for the many
locations of Munich, including Tel Aviv, Beirut and nearly all the cities throughout
Europe where the film's action takes place. A few days of shooting in Paris were
necessary for authenticity, and the farmhouse of "Papa" was a French location. Brooklyn,
of course, had to be shot in Brooklyn. Costume designer Joanna Johnston discusses
recreating multiple versions of Seventies clothing, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski
describes, with input from Spielberg, the film's visual design.
- The On-Set Experience (480i; 1.33:1; 14:24): A wide selection of participants describe
aspects of filming, ranging from technical demands to the emotional challenges of the
subject matter. Probably the most moving section is the account of recreating the Olympic
massacre itself, during which the Arab actors playing terrorists and the Jewish actors
playing hostages bonded deeply. A notable interviewee is Guri Weinberg, who plays his
father, Moshe Weinberg, an Israeli athlete who died resisting the hostage-takers.
- The International Cast (480i; 1.33:1; 12:41): Spielberg and casting supervisor Jina Jay
discuss the challenge of filling Munich's huge number of speaking roles. This featurette
also includes short interviews with several notable cast members not interviewed
elsewhere, such as Omar Metwally, Hiam Abbass, Michael Lonsdale and Mathieu
Amalric.
- Editing, Sound and Music (480i; 1.33:1; 12:23): Michael Kahn discusses the film's
editing (still the old-fashioned way with physical strips of film); Ben Burtt describes the
sound design; and John Williams talks about the score.
Munich Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation
Munich is probably still as controversial now as it was upon release. Its final shot, which I will
not spoil for those who have not seen it, was particularly disturbing to some American viewers,
although I simply took it as a reminder that the difficult questions asked by the film are not
limited to Israel. Certainly world events since the release of Munich have demonstrated its
continued topicality. Spielberg was mocked in some quarters for calling Munich "a prayer for
peace", but how many other filmmakers would have the guts (or the clout) to make an epic-scale
film about such a radioactive subject—and the talent to pull it off? Highest recommendation.