Munich is a 2005 historical drama film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, co-written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. It is based on the 1984 book Vengeance by George Jonas, an account of Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Munich was released by Universal Pictures in the United States and Canada and internationally by DreamWorks Pictures on December23, 2005, and received five Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Score. The film made $131million worldwide but just $47million in the United States, making it one of Spielberg's lowest-grossing films domestically. In 2017, the film was named the 16th "Best Film of the 21stCentury So Far" by The New York Times.
Plot
At the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the Palestinian militant group Black September carried out a terrorist attack resulting in the deaths of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team. Avner Kaufman, a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, is chosen to lead a mission to assassinate eleven Palestinians involved in the massacre. At the direction of his handler Ephraim, in order to give the Israeli government plausible deniability, Kaufman resigns from Mossad and operates with no official ties to Israel. 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 from Frankfurt. They are given information by a French informant, Louis, whose family's history is connected to the French Resistance.
In Rome, the team shoots and kills Wael Zwaiter, who is living as a poet. In Paris, they detonate a bomb in the home of Mahmoud Hamshari. In Cyprus, they bomb the hotel room of Hussein Abd Al Chir. With IDF commandos, they pursue three Palestinian militants—Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser—to Beirut, penetrate the Palestinians' guarded compound and kill all three.
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. In Athens, when they track down Zaiad Muchasi, the team finds out that Louis arranged for them to share a safe house with their rival PLO members and the Mossad agents escape trouble by pretending to be members of foreign militant groups like ETA, IRA, ANC, and the Red 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 to London to track down Ali Hassan Salameh, who orchestrated the Munich massacre, but the assassination attempt is interrupted by several drunken Americans. It is implied that these are agents of the CIA, which, according to Louis, protects and funds Salameh in exchange for his promise not to attack United States diplomats. Meanwhile, attempts are made to kill the assassins themselves. Carl is killed by an independent Dutch contract killer. In revenge, the team tracks her down and executes her at a houseboat in Hoorn, 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 in Spain, 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 to Israel, where he is unhappy to be hailed as a hero by two young soldiers, and then to his new home in Brooklyn, where he suffers post-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 nine of the eleven targeted Palestinians were killed, including Salameh, who was finally killed in 1979.
Cast
Eric Bana as Avner Kaufman (based on Yuval Aviv) Daniel Craig as Steve Ciarán Hinds as Carl Mathieu Kassovitz as Robert Hanns Zischler as Hans Ayelet Zurer as Daphna Kaufman Geoffrey Rush as Ephraim Mehdi Nebbou as Ali Hassan Salameh Gila Almagor as Avner's Mother Karim Saleh as Issa Michael Lonsdale as Papa Mathieu Amalric as Louis Ziad Adwan as Kamal Adwan Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Yvan Attal as Tony Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as Sylvie Meret Becker as Yvonne Roy Avigdori as Gad Tsobari Sam Feuer as Yossef Romano Marie-Josée Croze as Jeanette, the Dutch assassin Lynn Cohen as Golda Meir Guri Weinberg as Moshe Weinberg Makram Khoury as Wael Zwaiter Hiam Abbass as Marie Omar Metwally as Ali Ohad Knoller as Commando
Soundtrack
The film score was composed and conducted by John Williams. It features the wailing woman technique. The soundtrack album was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
AllMusic rated the soundtrack three and a half stars out of five.[ Allmusic review] Filmtracks.com rated it four out of five. SoundtrackNet rated it four and a half out of five. ScoreNotes graded it "A−".
Historical authenticity Although Munich is a work of fiction, it describes many actual events and figures from the early 1970s. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Golda Meir is depicted in the film, and other military and political leaders such as Attorney General Meir Shamgar, Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and Aman chief Aharon Yariv are also depicted. Spielberg tried to make the depiction of the hostage-taking and killing of the Israeli athletes historically authentic.Note: Israeli actor Gur Weinberg, one month old in September 1972 was used to portray his father Moshe, the wrestling coach and first hostage killed. Unlike an earlier film, 21 Hours at Munich, Spielberg's film depicts the shooting of all 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 actor Guri Weinberg portrays his own father, wrestling coach Moshe. The younger Weinberg was only one month old when his father was killed.
The named members of Black September, and their deaths, are also mostly factual. Abdel Wael Zwaiter, a translator at the Libyan Embassy in Rome was shot eleven times, one bullet for each of the victims of the Munich Massacre, in the lobby of his apartment forty-one days after Munich. On the eighth of December of that year Mahmoud Hamshari, a senior PLO figure, was killed in Paris 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 include Mohammed 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 in Beirut by a car bombHarari Evidence Copi that also killed four innocent bystanders and injured eighteen others.
The commando raid in Beirut, known as Operation Spring of Youth, also occurred. This attack included future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yom Kippur War and Operation Entebbe participant Yonatan 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.
Atlantic Productions, producers of BAFTA-nominated documentary Munich: 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 the Lillehammer affair in which an innocent Moroccan waiter was killed. This is not mentioned in the film. As acknowledged by Spielberg, the targets were not all directly involved in Munich.
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 operatives Gad Shimron and Victor Ostrovsky also dismissed the scene in which Prime Minister Golda Meir personally recruits Avner to lead the team as fiction. Mossad veterans were critical of the modus 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 an ad 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.
According to British intelligence writer Gordon Thomas, senior Mossad personnel, among them director general Meir 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 view Munich 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."
Reception Box office 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.
Critical reception