December 30 — Munich
11 min readJan 1, 2024
- (Intro to this series)
- (Previous notes: War of the Worlds)
- (Munich on IMDb)
- I saw this in the theater and I haven’t seen it since, even though I loved it. There’s some restraint here, right? Restraint that allows the natural drama of this story to affect us naturally, maybe? I am pretty sure that of the remaining Spielberg movies, this is the best one, although there is still some good stuff on the way. Actually, I’m pretty sure that the Venn diagram of “good Spielberg movies after War of the Worlds” and “Spielberg movies with screenplays by Tony Kushner” is nearly a single circle. We’ll see if I still say that after I’ve given The Post and The BFG another chance. Okay, it’s Munich time…
- Okay, when I hit play it offered the option of playing an introduction by Steven Spielberg. The gist of the intro is “there are very few confirmed details regarding what actually happened and I stand by the dramatic liberties we took.” Maybe he needs to record a similar intro for Catch Me If You Can.
- “Inspired by real events” is what the card says in the beginning.
- Then… here’s how little I remember, I would have probably told you that none of the actual events during the 1972 Olympics tragedy were shown in the movie. But no, the movie opens showing the terrorists sneaking into the dormitory, helped out by Americans who were just being friendly by boosting them over the fence. Then they get into the Israeli apartment and hold all the men at gunpoint.
- 0:04:55 — Neat, a shot showing the familiar news footage of a hooded terrorist on the balcony, paired with Spielberg-created footage of that happening, the actor had to match the movements exactly.
- While the terrorists are arguing we see that one of the victims is bloody and dead on the floor next to them.
- The crisis continues from various points of view of people watching the Munich terrorism news unfold on TV. We see a reporter reporting live and we see an explosion behind them. News people start reporting that they’ve heard that all the hostages are safe, wow, did that happen? Oops. The famous “they’re all gone” report follows that.
- Eric Bana and his pregnant wife are watching the news list the names of each victim, but also some people in a conference room are listing some other people with Arabic names, probably the terrorists. Golda Meir is leading that meeting, “we have to show them we’re strong”. She says she’s made a decision.
- EB is abruptly brought to a meeting with Meir. There are references to EB’s father, who apparently had a good, or significant reputation. They tell him he has to decide to do a super secret super dangerous mission that might take years. Geoffery Rush is the “case manager”
- “You do what the terrorists do, you think they report back to home base?” Setting up the situation that he’s supposed to be a covert assassin killing all the Munich terrorists hiding in Europe, eleven of them.
- Fun matching action when the accountant slams a dusty receipt book closed and it cuts to litter blowing around a Tel Aviv street probably. Super intriguing story but there are references to his team and we don’t know who the team is and it looks like EB also doesn’t know who the team is.
- Flashback to the beginning of the Munich crisis, super weird that I don’t remember this stuff, some graphic depictions of the killings of the Israelis, also one of them apparently stabbed a terrorist in the head, did that happen?
- A first meeting with The Team shows it’s five of them including EB. They have a friendly chat over dinner and get to know each other’s professional strengths, it could be a super normal first day for a project team.
- EB starts meeting with some people who can maybe tell him where each terrorist is. Sounds like he has to pay $60k to someone for each name. “I need receipts,” he says because that accountant said to get receipts.
- 0:35:35 — We’ve got maybe our first victim, they’re in Rome now and a seemingly mild-mannered man who is doing a talk about his translation of Arabian Nights into Italian is one of the terrorists who will shortly be assassinated. The team lurks, follows, lurks. How are they going to do it? They look confident so they must have a plan.
- They corner him bringing groceries home and shoot him through the groceries. It’s easy. Ciaran Hinds is one of the team members and he follows up with a glimpse of the body, which is smoldering in a visually interesting way.
- They’re in Paris now and they have a new contact with lead on another terrorist victim. One of them, sorry I’m not catching the names of everyone but this one has curly hair so “Curly” I think pretends to be a reporter because this future-victim is a PLO person in Paris? But he’s secretly doing some intel while he’s at PLO guy’s place, he gets information about the telephone. Also a child is home.
- Ah, he has created a replica of that telephone, one which has explosives in it, the whole team sneaks in and plants the phone bomb. We heard in the earlier exposition that shootings would be better, bombs are too messy, but it was still EB’s judgement call I guess. So with the bomb planted, they have a light that will go on when Victim #2 picks up the fake phone, they will then manually blow it up. But! The child came home, and they didn’t see her go in, they don’t know the child is in there, she is a cute little girl who likes to practice piano. She answers the fake phone, CH realizes that it’s a child and runs to the other car where the detonator guy is to abort, it’s very suspenseful!
- And then the child leaves and they try again, this time it works according to plan. Cool edit from him answering the phone to the explosion seen from outside. The Team is concerned that the bomb was kinda weak.
- After that, some more globetrotting. EB tells someone on the phone, “I’m in New York, following a lead,” but he’s actually visiting his parents. Then he’s back in Israel for the birth of his baby, which means it’s only been a couple of months because she was seven months pregnant at the beginning. Felt like longer. Also he’s probably not allowed to visit the parents?
- Then they’re tracking Victim #3 and they’re in Cyprus. But this one is… KGB? Apparently. The toymaker team member, Curly who made the phone bomb, has a new gadget that will blow Victim #3 up when he gets in bed. But there still is a manual element, so EB has the room next door, it’s a hotel, and will signal when to explode this victim. Things this movie has in common with James Bond movies… globetrotting locations, gadgets, and Daniel Craig, who plays one of the team members with I think a South African accent. Oh, and the guy that was the Paris contact, that French actor was in a Bond movie, I forget which.
- So this plan seems much clumsier. EB signals to set off the bomb and the bomb is too powerful so others were injured including EB. An arm is dangling from a ceiling fan, which is cool if it came from that victim. They start to suspect that the aforementioned Paris contact, Louis, who was supplying the explosives as well as their fishing boat hideout, might not be on the level. But we wonder if Curly went harder on the explosives this time because it was kind of weak with victim #2.
- They meet with GR who wants to find out who Louis is, but instead EB persuades him to let them do a bigger three-man assassination in Beirut even though the rule had been Europe-only, no Arab country activity. Next scene they have like 25 guys doing an operation where some of them dress like women for some reason. They start shooting their way into some kind of apartment complex which must be something other than just a regular apartment complex. They have pictures of the three men they’re looking for and find them in apartments and loudly machine-gun them. But it’s so guns-blazing that lots of bad guys show up with machine guns and everyone is machine-gunning…
- …and there is an odd jump cut back to Paris, EB is meeting with Louis, and he’s telling him that he wasn’t part of that big assault, although we saw him and DC. It is odd, why was it a big loud shooty assault and who were all the helpers?
- 1:18:26 — Louis blindfolds EB and drives him out to the country for a meeting with “Papa” his boss. Probably some gangster leader but, like the terrorists, he seems like a friendly and mild-mannered family man. They talk about cooking. A whole family dinner happens. EB leaves there on respectful terms and the story will continue as planned, it seems.
- The team goes to Athens for Victim #7 (we’re counting the three bonus targets in Beirut as 4/5/6) and Curly has a new bomb. That night they are sleeping in their safehouse and some PLO guys stroll in like they live there. Everyone draws their guns but no triggers are pulled. Apparently Louis double-booked the safe house. HMMM. They decide to just share.
- DC and a PLO guy tacitly argue over what station to turn the radio to, but they both like American R&B so that’s settled. EB and another PLO guy named Ali smoke in a stairwell and have an interesting discussion about Israel & Palestine, with Ali thinking that EB is a non-Jewish German.
- Victim #7 goes super badly, why are they this bad at it? They placed that crappy bomb and it doesn’t go off, so one of the Team guys takes a grenade and goes up to the guy’s hotel room, tosses the grenade and just closes the thin wooden door before it explodes. The hotelier saw it all, and also the PLO friends were outside the hotel and they figure out the situation quickly and they all shoot at each other and they especially shoot Ali. It’s kind of visually interesting. The Team should suck less at this though.
- Victim #8 is in London and is “untouchable” so they decide they’ll probably have to kill “innocent” “bodyguards”. There is percussive suspense-beating music that is a little unusual for John Williams. They’re close to #8 when some ostensible drunk Americans get in the way. It seems a little too convenient, like maybe there were clever spies protecting #8.
- EB goes to a bar by himself and starts a flirty conversation with a conspicuously-alone beautiful woman, played by someone who was in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with, hey, that same actor that plays Louis, but by the way this actress is actually amazing in that movie and please remind me next time you see me to show you one particular scene where she demonstrates masterful film acting. EB is not seduced; a few minutes later he warns CH about the “honey trap”.
- 1:55:00 — Another flashback to Munich. As someone who doesn’t remember some details about what happened, I do want to see this stuff because weren’t some of the terrorists captured/killed, but also then who are the assassins assassinating exactly, and why is it such normal-seeming men? We don’t learn that in this flashback, but it is interesting that Spielberg cuts to those in a slightly jarring way with nothing indicating that it’s a flashback.
- Eep, Honey Trap has struck, she killed CH! EB recognized the smell of her perfume, which was set up during the flirty scene, and he smelled it on CH’s door which was ajar, so that’s how he finds the body.
- Louis and Papa have swiftly tracked down Honey Trap for them, for free, and also suggest that they are being hunted. The team goes to Honey Trap’s houseboat in The Netherlands and they quietly gun her down there. Before they shoot her she flashes some boob out of desperation… except actually even as I was typing that I was like, wait, no, not so much desperation because, there was actually a look on her face that suggested that this has been a successful tactic before. One of them finishes her off with a weird, cool weapon where he slaps the back of it and a projectile head-kills her. This actress in interesting to watch here as well. Marie-Josée Croze is her name. I remember it.
- In another city now and another one from the team is dead, knife wound on a bench. It’s just EB, DC, and Curly now.
- Then a sequence cutting between Curly making a bomb somewhere and EB turning his apartment upside down out of paranoia. EB doesn’t find anything, but Curly blows up. An accident? The next scene is EB and Louis and Louis suggests, yes, accident. He says Victim #8 is now in Spain and is the one who planned Munich.
- EB and DC go to a compound in Spain to kill #8, but a teenaged bodyguard spots them so they kill him and have to run away chased by gunfire. EB returns to Israel and it’s like it’s all over, the entire mission is complete for him, also we know it’s been a year. GR wants to know who Louis is because he wants to find out whether or not Louis is double-crossing him. We honestly don’t know. He tells GR he won’t return to being an agent, and he goes to Brooklyn to be with his wife and new daughter who really does look like the two of them.
- He’s paranoid now. He contacts Papa and isn’t sufficiently reassured by what Papa says, so he marches into someone’s office in the Israeli consulate and accuses them of maybe trying to kill his family. One more flashback to Munich shows the killings of the rest of the Israeli athletes because it just all gets messed up and everyone is shooting at everyone, but those shots are juxtaposed with EB having aggressive, frowny sex with his wife.
- Final scene is a meeting in a park between EB and GR, they get closure and the shot holds on the Twin Towers, which were new when this movie takes place and four years post-collapse when this movie was made.
- So yes, a mature take on a really interesting history-inspired story, with a more subtle approach from this director. The flashbacks to the original terrorist attack were… okay, as far as I know this isn’t the case but it’s almost like they made the movie with zero scenes from Munich, and then decided at the last minute to film some. You’d kind of expect more from those, and also maybe a distinct style to them or something. Also there were certain abrupt editing choices which were actually kind of cool and helped this movie seem a lot shorter than it is, but they also made me go “whaa?” sometimes. And the dialogue had some Jewish vernacular that was foreign to me. But I think this is a very good movie and I will definitely watch it again someday.
- (Next: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)
