Munich, West Germany, 1972: The image of the “cheerful” Olympic Games is broken after the Palestinian terror organization known as Black September infiltrates the Israeli camp in the Olympic Village, killing two and taking a further nine athletes hostage. A failed rescue attempt results in the deaths of all hostages and most of the kidnappers. With the games not being called off despite the tragic incident, the Israeli government takes matter into their own hands and assembles a secret hit squad to eliminate the people behind the Munich massacre. The team - Steve (Daniel Craig), Carl (Ciarán Hinds), Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), Hans (Hanns Zischler) and their leader Avner (Eric Bana) - travel to Europe and the States, but their sense of righteousness and pride over their initial achievements is gradually replaced by doubts about the morality and effictiveness of their undertaking.

Director Steven Spielberg chose a very difficult subject matter for his latest film. The 1972 tragedy in Munich is widely considered to be one of last century’s most significant terrorist attacks in that it dislocated the Middle-East conflict to a place the entire world was observing and thrust the Palestinian cause into the spotlight. Spielberg’s approach is inspired by the true events and based on the book ‘Vengeance’ by George Jonas and ultimately amounts to an analysis of how violence met with violence can only result in more violence. Spielberg preferred to opt against any marketing for the film at all, preferring Munich to talk for itself. And ever since its first screenings, the film has been attested with a lot of controversy - but how can a film about controversial events not be controversial itself?

A lot of this stigma stems from the fact that Munich is morally ambigious. Editing in flashbacks of the Munich attack and the massacre, Spielberg shows that the team is clinging on to these memories as the force that drives them to kill the people on their hit list. But characters and their cause aren’t glorified, at times they genuinely question if what they are doing is right. Anyone they kill seems to be immediately replaced by someone new and worse. For every hit they execute, innocent Isrealis fall prey to terrorist retaliations elsewhere. And soon the team members find themselves intertwined in a net of global terrorism, becoming targets themselves. This is poignantly illustrated through the character of ‘Papa’ who leads an autonomous group that can track down anyone for whomever pays well enough. Avner, the team leader, soon realizes that his source is not providing locations exclusively to him, and there may be other bidders in the equation.

Australian actor Eric Bana gives a haunting performance, showing us various facettes of Avner’s rich nature. Avner seems to go through every major emotional state within the film. Killing his targets first hesitatingly and nervously then in cold-blood (including a brutal private payback jointly executed by the team during a detour from their mission) or firing himself up with the memory of the massacre first then tearing apart his room in oblivious paranoia. The unconditional love for his wife and his newborn daughter are put in perspective by his devotion to Isreal, his home and true mother since his birth mother abandoned him when he was but an infant. Avner’s character is rather brilliantly in his mind.

‘Home’ is indeed a prominent theme in the film. Avner and his team cross paths with a group of Palestinian extremists (who don’t know that they are Jewish). And even though he refutes the other group leader’s claims for a Palestine nation, a home and identity for their people, they are very similar to his own convictions. Is your nation your home, family and identity? Or is your family your home, your identity? Avner is faced with these questions throughout the film, and it’s his decision on this that concludes his character’s arc in the end. The rest of the team all have their own little stories. Daniel Craig’s character Steve, who has quite a lot a screentime and dialogue, is the toughest and most uncompromising of the lot, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t anxious in the build-up to and aftermath of a hit. Ciarán Hinds’ Carl is the one who goes in after a hit and cleans up the tracks, but he’s also the more contemplative of the team, Mathieu Kassovitz’s Robert is the bomb builder who’s weapon’s blasts are either too little or too strong or don’t go off at all. Each of the characters is beset with his own individual strengths and flaws.

The weakness of Munich lies in the way it isn’t overly dramatized. The film runs for 169 minutes, and you feel it. Spielberg, in what was most likely a conscious decision, refuses to intensify scenes more than they need to be, which makes sense considering the subject, but in terms of plot progression this makes for a really slow pace without any real climaxes. As paradox as this may sound, the underdramatizing is also Munich’s greatest strength. The film is far from being black and white and offers no real answers. It doesn’t condemn individual characters (even the Black September agents are depicted as shaky youths driven by fear and adrenaline), but takes a stand against the concept of revenge as a whole. But just because the film spends two and a half hours analysing a process that it declares pointless in the end, the film itself couldn’t be anything less than that. Ultimately, the message that Munich carries with it is stronger and more important than the film itself, and it is entirely timely in a world that still believes that there’s only the muscle way to set aside differences.

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