MUNICH (2005)

Positive Experience/Entertaining? JEEZUS, NO!! This was the most mudled and mindnumbing film I've seen in a long time!


Technically any good? Cinematography was great, but everything else was pretty horrible. I don't blame the actors for not being great--with this script and no decent direction to speak of they had no choice but to suck, too. This script was a mess--rather than following a structure where plot points lead into one another this was simply a movie portraying random events featuring the same characters. No lines are drawn between the plot points. The film seems to only make it's thematic points with hamfist-precision--pretty much what you expect these days from a Spielberg film. Oh and I didn't care about anyone or anything in the entire film.


How did it leave me feeling? Flustered, frustrated and annoyed--it was worse than I expected. Plus it gave my wife a headache. This movie is up for best picture? WHY??? My God this movie was terrible.


Final Rating? DNS

Please click over to page 2 of this post to read more of my opinion on this truly terrible film but BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU WANT THE SPOILERS!!!

KEEEERIST this movie was shockingly bad. I can't go on enough about how bad this movie was. There was no character development to speak of--it was just "HERE ARE SOME CHARACTERS DOING THINGS!"

HEY, SPIELBERG: Showing your characters doing things does not automatically make the audience sympathize with them!!! I thought you knew this by now!!

Back in the day, Spielberg films had souls--by this I mean that at their cores they seemed like real events that really took place with real people. We see how these people live their lives--not just THAT they're living their lives. In Poltergeist there's this wonderful scene where the family is having breakfast. But the film doesn't just show them "having breakfast" we see how the boy is obnoxious and the older sister is obnoxious back until the milk spills on her notebook (GHOSTS!!) and we watch the dad as he ties his tie around the phone cord.

Bits like this show us HOW a character lives, not just THAT he lives.

Eric Bana's O-face (seriously).

There was a time when Spielberg would not only show us characters interacting, but he'd let us HEAR THEM, TOO. In Munich we are treated to the first few minutes of the team's first dinner together. After that, it's all just them having a good time laughing and eating in slowmo silence with John Williams' obnoxious score playing over it.

If Spielberg were to direct Jaws today he'd have the scene leading up to Quint's Indianapolis speech be in slowmo with some crappy music by John Williams playing over it instead of the brilliant dialogue that had the three of characters comparing scars while drunk.

But back to Munich. The film doesn't grab you AT ALL. There's nothing for us to grab onto either. Characters are portrayed with a flatness I haven't seen in a film directed by someone of Spielbergs calibur. Every character speaks exactly their mind and nowhere in the film is there such a thing called "subtlety."

The first time Bana's character meets with the godfather of French organized crime the godfather (predictably called "Papa") tells Bana something to the effect of: "You could have been my son, but you're not--don't you forget that."

This seems to suggest that Papa is going to kill him later on in the film. Yet, he doesn't. In fact, Papa travels to Bana personally to hand him info on a woman who killed one of Bana's team. He then proceeds to tell Bana exactly why he's there in person.

ABSURDITY. NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT IN REAL LIFE.

Well, maybe my step-father, but he's Italian. ;)

KIDDING.

Anyway, so then there's the scene where Bana calls his wife who holds his daughter in her arms (they're safe in Brooklyn, far away from daddy's killing). The mom puts the phone next to the baby's head and the baby says "dada" or something like that. Bana then INSTANTLY CRIES.

Cut back to baby talking some more.

Cut to Bana NOT CRYING AT ALL. He says a few words and then we cut to wierd angle down on Bana as he drops back onto his bed crying his eyes out.

It was like watching Ben Affleck act.

ON

off

ON

off

No subtlety, just giant, broad strokes--easy to see and even easier to direct.

Then we have 8, COUNT THEM, EIGHT fucking endings!!

1) Bana goes back to Israel.
2) Bana gets debriefed
3) Bana gets debriefed by his mom
4) Bana goes to Brooklyn
5) Bana has nightmares that he'll never get rid of
6) Bana thinks he's being threatened by Mossad
7) Bana has disturbing sex with his wife while imagining in absurd detail the deaths of the hostages in Munich.
8) Bana is somehow able to get his controller from Mossad to visit him in Jersey where he explains, with all the hamfistedness Spielberg can muster, why Bana's character killed 9 people.

The final shot ends on the WTC, clearly Spielberg's OH SO SUBTLE way of reminding us that terrorism is still going on and people continue to overreact to it. This is where the ultimate failing of this movie comes into play.

It provides no alternative for us. At its best, it simply states that terrorism is bad and so is revenge. So "we" should "stop."

It's the ultimate liberal movie--it doesn't try to deal with the problem--it just wants the problem to go away. Like a small child screaming at his/her already screaming (at each other) parents: "BOTH OF YOU STOP FIGHTING!!!!!"

And like a child, Munich ultimately doesn't seem to understand that there are reasons both sides continue to fight each other.

I'd love to see a film actually tell us why terrorists terrorize. The answer to that is simply: they have no other choice.

A person only becomes a savage when they have no other options. Palestinians felt that they couldn't get Israel off of their land. So, they took hostages and killed them. Israel was upset that some of the Palestinians involved in the hostage-taking/murdering got away. Too many people would sympathize with the Palestinian hostage-takers/murderers so Israel couldn't just use diplomatic means to get them. Since many of them were in Europe they couldn't just bomb the shit out of them and hope that they were among the dead, so what do they do?

They hire a squad of assassins.

But none of this portrayed in the film. The film doesn't tell us why the Israeli government wants the hostage-takers/murderers dead. We just have to assume it's because of revenge and that's it.

The job of a movie is to justify actions not just show actions.

We're told that Bana's character grew up on a kabutz (sp??) but most of the world doesn't know what the hell a kabutz even is--luckily, I have an inkling so I was able to explain to my wife that this was Spielberg telling us Bana's character has been indoctrinated since childhood to love Israel--which we then must assume is why he takes the mission given to him despite the fact that he has been given absolutely no details of said mission.

I could go on, but I think I'm getting my wife's headache now.

I do want to add one last thing:

It strikes me as odd and very disturbing that the only time Spielberg shows us tits in his movies is when he's about to show the owner of said tits shot in the chest.

In the most excruciating scene of the movie, three of the team go after this gorgeous woman who assassinated one of the team after conning him into bed. They use these little metal rods that fire one small-calibur bullet each by slamming your hand down on one end. The small calibur bullets are enough to do damage to kill a person, but they don't do a very fast job of it.

The honey trap chick slides her robe down, exposing her breasts and just as we get to see that they are very nice breasts they shoot her twice. Once, just above her right breast and once to the left of the center of her chest just below the colar bone. She doesn't fall over--she just stands there--she walks toward the men, passes them by, hugs her cat (not making this up) and then sits down on a chair. Then, the colar bone wound begins to spew blood quickly. This whole time, her tits are hanging out of her robe, which is still tied around her waist.

Finally, the camera cuts to an over-her-shoulder shot on the three men as the third takes one last shot, sending a bullet through her head (her hair flops with the shot).

Then something dispicable happens. We cut to the reverse angle and the woman's robe is completely open. Her thatch is showing and everything. This was not the case on the previous use of this angle. Bana's character steps forward and covers her up only for the third guy to pull the robe back, exposing her again. The other two do nothing to cover her back up again. We then cut away to days later.

I understand that Spielberg didn't want the death of this woman to seem glamorous or cool in the least and I agree with that sentiment. However, they were getting revenge and generally speaking she was a killer and would likely kill again. While I'm against capital punishment, I do believe some people will not reform. Shit, she was a professional assassin. Might as well treat killing this woman, cinematically, as a good thing. It's not like we look up to Bana and his friends as role models or anything.

However, my main point is that the one time Spielberg shows us a truly hot naked woman in his films he punishes us by killing her violently--chillingly--by having her shot twice, stagger around, hug her cat, then start bleeding profusely only to be shot in the head.

That's more than a little fucked up.

In really basic cinematic/visual language, Spielberg is telling us: "You don't want to see a naked woman."

I think that sort of thing is called "negative reinforcement."

Later, we're treated to a sex scene between Bana's character and his wife, yet she's not naked. However, we see through Bana's eyes the murder of the Israeli Olympic guys.

Again, in really basic cinematic/visual language Spielberg is telling us: "Even sex without female nudity is like a masacre."

Spielberg, you are one fucked up dude.