A scene from the film representing the Mossad team from 1972. From left to right: Avner Kaufman, Robert, Carl, Hans and Steve.
At the1972 Summer Olympics inMunich, thePalestinian militant groupBlack September carried outa terrorist attack resulting in the deaths of 11 members of theIsraeli Olympic team. Avner Kaufman, aMossad agent ofGerman-Jewish descent, is chosen to lead a mission to assassinate 11 Palestinians allegedly involved in the massacre. At the direction of hishandler Ephraim, to give the Israeli governmentplausible deniability, Kaufman resigns from Mossad and operates with no official ties toIsrael. His team includes four Jewish volunteers from around the world:South African driver Steve,Belgian toy-maker and explosives expert Robert, former Israeli soldier and "cleaner" Carl, and German antique dealer and document forger Hans fromFrankfurt. They are given information by a French informant, Louis, whose family's history is connected tothe French Resistance.
Between hits, the assassins argue with each other about the morality and logistics of their mission, expressing fear about their individual lack of experience, as well as their apparent ambivalence about accidentally killing innocent bystanders. Avner makes a brief visit to his wife, who has given birth to their first baby. InAthens, when they track down Zaiad Muchasi, the team finds out that Louis arranged for them to share a safe house with their rivalPLO members and the Mossad agents escape trouble by pretending to be members of foreign militant groups likeETA,IRA,ANC, and theRed Army Faction. Avner has a heartfelt conversation with PLO member Ali over their homelands and who deserves to rule over the lands. Ali is later shot by Carl while the team escapes from the hit on Muchasi.
The squad moves on toLondon to track downAli Hassan Salameh, who orchestrated the Munich massacre, but the assassination attempt is interrupted by several drunkenAmericans. It is implied that these are agents of theCIA, which, according to Louis, protects and funds Salameh in exchange for his promise not to attackUnited States diplomats. Meanwhile, attempts are made to kill the assassins themselves. Carl is killed by an independentDutch contract killer. In revenge, the team tracks her down and executes her at a houseboat inHoorn,Netherlands. Hans is found stabbed to death on a park bench, and Robert is killed by an explosion in his workshop. Avner and Steve finally locate Salameh inSpain, but again their assassination attempt is thwarted, this time by Salameh's armed guards. Avner and Steve disagree on whether Louis has sold information on the team to the PLO.
A disillusioned Avner flies toIsrael, where he is unhappy to be hailed as a hero by two young soldiers, and then to his new home inBrooklyn, where he sufferspost-traumatic stress,paranoia and has flashbacks from the Munich massacre. Concerns continue to grow when he speaks to Louis' father by phone and it is revealed he knows his real name and promises no violence will come to him from his family. He is thrown out of the Israeli consulate after storming in to demand that Mossad leave his wife and child alone. Ephraim comes to ask Avner to return to Israel and Mossad, but Avner refuses. Avner then asks Ephraim to come to dinner with his family, to break bread as an allegory to make peace, but Ephraim refuses, perhaps as a sign that neither side will reconcile.
A title card reveals 9[a] of the 11 targeted Palestinians were killed, including Salameh, who was finally killed in 1979.
AllMusic rated the soundtrack three and a half stars out of five.[6]Filmtracks.com rated it four out of five.[7] SoundtrackNet rated it four and a half out of five.[8] ScoreNotes graded it "A−".[9]
AlthoughMunich is a work of fiction, it describes many actual events and figures from the early 1970s. On the Israeli side, Prime MinisterGolda Meir is depicted in the film, and other military and political leaders such as Attorney GeneralMeir Shamgar, Mossad chiefZvi Zamir andAman chiefAharon Yariv are also depicted. Spielberg tried to make the depiction of the hostage-taking and killing of the Israeli athletes historically authentic.[10] Unlike an earlier film,21 Hours at Munich, Spielberg's film depicts the shooting ofall the Israeli athletes, which according to the autopsies was accurate. In addition, the film uses actual news clips shot during the hostage situation.
Israeli/American actorGuri Weinberg portrays his own father, wrestling coachMoshe. The younger Weinberg was only one month old when his father was killed.
The named members ofBlack September, and their deaths, are also mostly factual.Abdel Wael Zwaiter, a translator at theLibyan Embassy in Rome, was shot 11 times, one bullet for each of the victims of the Munich Massacre, in the lobby of his apartment 41 days after Munich. On December 8 of that yearMahmoud Hamshari, a senior PLO figure, was killed inParis by a bomb concealed in the table below his telephone. Although the film depicts the bomb being concealed in the telephone itself, other details of the assassination (such as confirmation of the target via telephone call) are accurate. Others killed during this period includeMohammed Boudia,Basil Al Kubaisi, Hussein al-Bashir, and Zaiad Muchasi, some of whose deaths are depicted in the film.Ali Hassan Salameh was also a real person and a prominent member of Black September. In 1979 he was killed inBeirut by a car bomb[11] that also killed four innocent bystanders and injured 18 others.[12]
The commando raid inBeirut, known asOperation Spring of Youth, also occurred. This attack included future Israeli Prime MinisterEhud Barak andYom Kippur War andOperation Entebbe participantYonatan Netanyahu, who are both portrayed by name in the film. The methods used to track down and assassinate the Black September members were much more complicated than the methods portrayed in the film; for example, the tracking of the Black September cell members was achieved by a network of Mossad agents, not an informant as depicted in the film.[13]
Atlantic Productions, producers ofBAFTA-nominated documentaryMunich: Mossad's Revenge, listed several discrepancies between Spielberg's film and the information it obtained from interviews with Mossad agents involved in the operation. It noted that the film suggests one group carried out almost all the assassinations, whereas in reality, it was a much larger team. Mossad did not work with a mysterious French underworld figure as portrayed in the book and the film. The assassination campaign did not end because agents lost their nerve but because of theLillehammer affair in which an innocentMoroccan waiter was killed. This is not mentioned in the film. As acknowledged by Spielberg, the targets were not all directly involved in Munich.[14]
Former Mossad operatives criticized the film for inaccurately portraying Mossad operations.David Kimche, the former deputy director of the Mossad, said "I think it is a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should have based this film on a book that is a falsehood." Former Mossad operativesGad Shimron andVictor Ostrovsky also dismissed the scene in which Prime MinisterGolda Meir personally recruits Avner to lead the team as fiction. Mossad veterans were critical of themodus operandi portrayed by the film, in which a single hit team is sent into the field for months, and which includes a forger and bomb-maker to enable it to function alone. They claimed that in reality, the assassinations were conducted by large numbers of personnel, with hit teams assembled and sent out on anad hoc basis, never spending more than a few days or at most weeks in the field, and withdrawn as soon as each mission was complete. The all-male makeup of the team was criticized; former operatives claimed it was standard practice to include female agents on such missions to help get closer to targets. The film's portrayal of the assassins as gradually developing feelings of revulsion over what they were doing was also panned as inaccurate, with veterans claiming that the assassins did not doubt what they were doing and that the Mossad provides psychologists for any agents who develop doubts about their missions.[15][16]
According to British intelligence writerGordon Thomas, senior Mossad personnel, among them director generalMeir Dagan, held a private viewing of the film, and "In the darkened cinema they sat first in silence and then a steady mounting murmured chorus of 'it could never have happened like this' … 'this is fantasy' … 'this is pure fiction' … 'this is history, Hollywood style'." Thomas cited Dagan as calling the film "absolute rubbish" and claiming that those who viewMunich would come away with a "seriously distorted view of the truth." He also cited one of Dagan's aides as stating "Dagan felt Munich is more Indiana Jones than any semblance of reality. The hunting down of the Black September killers was a carefully controlled operation that involved a large number of people. The kidon had undergone weeks of studying their targets. Little of this appears in the film."[16]
Some reviewers criticizedMunich for what they call the film's equating the Israeli assassins with "terrorists".[17]Leon Wieseltier wrote inThe New Republic: "Worse,Munich prefers a discussion of counter-terrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion".[18]
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. In an interview withReuters, a retired head of Israel'sShin Bet intelligence service and former Internal Security Minister,Avi Dichter, likenedMunich to a children's adventure story: "There is no comparison between what you see in the movie and how it works in reality".[19] In aTime magazine cover story about the film on December 4, 2005, Spielberg said that the source of the film 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."[20]
TheZionist Organization of America (ZOA) – describing itself as "the oldest, and one of the largest, pro-Israel and Zionist organizations in the United States" – called for aboycott of the film on December 27, 2005.[21] The ZOA criticized the factual basis of the film and leveled criticism at one of the screenwriters,Tony Kushner, whom the ZOA has described as an "Israel-hater".[22] Criticism was also directed at theAnti-Defamation League's (ADL) National Director,Abraham Foxman, for his support of the film.[21]
David Edelstein of the onlineSlate magazine 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. WhatMunich does say is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective."[23]
Ilana Romano, wife of an Israeli weightlifterYossef Romano killed in the Munich massacre, said that Spielberg overlooked theLillehammer affair,[24][25][26] although Spielberg seems to have been conscious of the omission; the film's opening title frame showsLillehammer in a montage of city names, withMunich standing out from the rest. TheJewish Journal said that "the revenge squad obsess about making sure only their targets are hit -- and meticulous care is taken to avoid collateral damage. Yet in one shootout an innocent man is also slain ... The intense moral contortions the agents experience as the corpses pile up makes up the substance of the movie."[27]
According toRonen Bergman as reported inNewsweek, it is a myth thatMossad agents hunted down and killed those responsible for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes and a German policeman at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games; in fact most of the people were never killed or caught. Most of the people that Mossad did kill had nothing to do with the Munich deaths. He says the film was based on a book whose source was an Israeli who claimed to be the lead assassin of the hit squad, but in fact, was a baggage inspector at Tel Aviv airport.[28]
The film grossed $47 million at the box office in North America but performed better overseas, earning $83 million which brings the worldwide total of $131 million.
OnRotten Tomatoes, the film has a 79% approval rating based on 210 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The site's consensus reads, "Munich can't quite achieve its lofty goals, but this thrilling, politically even-handed look at the fallout from an intractable political conflict is still well worth watching."[29]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 74 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[30] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[31]
Roger Ebert praised the film, saying, "With this film [Spielberg] has dramatically opened a wider dialogue, helping to make the inarguable into the debatable."[32][33] He placed it at No. 3 on his top ten list of 2005.[34]James Berardinelli wrote that "Munich is an eye-opener – a motion picture that asks difficult questions, presents well-developed characters, and keeps us white-knuckled throughout." He named it the best film of the year;[35] it was the only film in 2005 to which Berardinelli gave four stars,[36] and he also put it on his Top 100 Films of All Time list.[37]Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman mentionedMunich amongst the best movies of the decade.[38] Rex Reed fromThe New York Observer disagrees, writing: "With no heart, no ideology and not much intellectual debate,Munich is a big disappointment, and something of a bore."[39]
Variety reviewerTodd McCarthy calledMunich a "beautifully made" film. However, he criticized the film for failing to include "compelling" characters, and for its use of laborious plotting and a "flabby script." McCarthy says that the film turns into "... a lumpy and overlong morality play on a failed thriller template." To succeed, McCarthy states that Spielberg would have needed to engage the viewer in the assassin squad leader's growing crisis of conscience and create a more "sustain(ed) intellectual interest" for the viewer.[40] Writing inEmpire, Ian Nathan wrote "Munich is Steven Spielberg's most difficult film. It arrives already inflamed by controversy. ... This is Spielberg operating at his peak—an exceptionally made, provocative, and vital film for our times."[41]
Chicago Tribune reviewer Allison Benedikt callsMunich a "competent thriller", but laments that as an "intellectual pursuit, it is little more than a pretty prism through which superficial Jewish guilt and generalized Palestinian nationalism" are made to "... look like the product of serious soul-searching." Benedikt states that Spielberg's treatment of the film's "dense and complicated" subject matter can be summed up as "Palestinians want a homeland, Israelis have to protect theirs." She rhetorically asks: "Do we need another handsome, well-assembled, entertaining movie to prove that we all bleed red?"[42]
Another critique was Gabriel Schoenfeld's "Spielberg's 'Munich'" in the February 2006 issue ofCommentary, who called it "pernicious". He compared the fictional film to history, asserted that Spielberg and especially Kushner felt that the Palestinian terrorists and the Mossad agents are morally equivalent, and concluded: "The movie deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year."[43] Israeli author and journalistAaron J. Klein wrote inSlate that the movie was a "distortion" of facts, concluding that "A rigorous factual accounting may not be the point of Munich, which Spielberg has characterized as a 'prayer for peace.' But as result,Munich has less to do with history and the grim aftermath of the Munich Massacre than some might wish."[44]
In defense of the climactic sex scene, critics Jim Emerson of theChicago Sun-Times and Matt Zoller Seitz ofSalon compared it toLady Macbeth's suicide inWilliam Shakespeare'sMacbeth, interpreting the sequence as representing the corruption of Avner's personal life as a result of his being conditioned to kill others to avenge Munich.[45]
^A book calledStriding Back, which was published in 2006, the year after the film was released, claimedWadie Haddad was given poisoned chocolate byMossad. If that were true that would mean actually 10 of the 11 targets were killed.Abu Daoud was still alive when the film was released.
^MacAskill, Ewen (January 26, 2006)."Munich: Mossad breaks cover".The Guardian. London.Archived from the original on December 10, 2017. RetrievedMay 13, 2010.
