GQ’s film critic Tom Carson singles out Steven Spielberg’s Munich as the best high-minded politically liberal film of the year in the April edition of the magazine. Although I don’t agree with his criticisms of these other films (Syrianna, The Constant Gardener-for example)—I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Munich. I guess that's the advantage of having low expectations. I agree that the gritty opening sequence approximates the 1972 Olympic spectacle where Israeli athletes are taken captive and killed. Carson nails it when he states:
Cinematically, one of Munich’s best touches is the way Spielberg evokes the 70s by echoing the look of the era’s films, with their zoom shots, druggy editing, and very un-Spielberg-like moral muck. But the movie he plainly studied hardest was Gillo Pontecorvo’s The battle of Algiers, with its heart-stopping scenes when the audience understands that the Algerian rebels-the people we’re rooting for-are about to blow up innocent, happy French women and children. Since, Algiers was fiercely pro-revolutionary, nobody can really doubt Spielberg’s sympathies in Munich: You don’t worry about a country losing its soul unless you’re convinced it got one. Suggesting Israel’s survival has come at a hard price in human values-and specifically Jewish ones, too-hardly equals calling for its destruction, especially since Spielberg stops well short of showing Palestinians feeling similar qualms about their tactics, and maybe they don’t. The movie’s real burden is the director’s glum apprehension that, while dramatizing the toll the assassinations take on the hero’s psyche, he can’t confidently claim they were unjustified or unnecessary.
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