Empty Thrills

Despite the hype--and master craftsmanship--Steven Spielberg's 'Munich' fails to make any coherent statement.

With all the pomp and hype surrounding the newest Steven Spielberg film and with major news magazines freely referring to it a masterpiece, it may be something of a shock to discover that, after all, "Munich" is just a movie. Neither a disquisition on Middle East history nor "a prayer for peace" (as Spielberg described the film to Time magazine) "Munich" owes less in its scope to Spielberg's own "Schindler's List" than to its clear antecedent--the tense, paranoid spy thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, often adapted from novels by John le Carré or Eric Ambler. Crammed full of foreign capitals, rainy streets, classical architecture, shady dealers, and free-floating intrigue, "Munich" is precisely what meetsthe murder by terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He is at the head of a crack team of operatives given carte blanche to dispatch the remaining ringleaders of the Black September Palestinian organization behind the massacre.

Spielberg swiftly and efficiently sketches the events of "Munich," terrifying in their unexpectedly banal brutality. "Munich" returns again and again to Bana's imaginings of Munich, but the effect is an inoculation, meant to shield viewers from the full realization that "Munich" is a film about Israelis killing Palestinians. This accounts for why the Palestinian characters, wanted terrorists and murderers all, are so much more alive onscreen than their Israeli counterparts, though they're all rendered equivalent by the film's simple-minded politics of killing. It is not a full treatment