Seeker Blog

If you are considering seeing Steven Spielberg’s new movie “Munich” you should first read Bret Stephens
review:

Steven Spielberg wants you to know one thing about “Munich,” his just-released, semihistorical, instantly controversial account of Israel’s efforts to avenge the massacre of its athletes at the 1972 Olympics: “I worked very hard,” he says, “so this film was not in any way, shape or form going to be an attack on Israel.” So why is his movie raising such hackles among Israelis and those generally known as the “pro-Israel” crowd?

Maybe it has something to do with his choice of a screenwriter, Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright brought in by Mr. Spielberg to rework the original screenplay by Eric Roth. Mr. Kushner (who, like Mr. Spielberg, is Jewish) believes that the creation of the state of Israel was “a historical, moral, political calamity” for the Jewish people. He believes the policy of the government of Israel has been “a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people.” He believes that responsibility for making peace between Israelis and Palestinians lies primarily with the Israelis, “inasmuch as they are far more mighty.” He believes Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is an “unindicted war criminal.”

. . .

Maybe it has something to do with Mr. Spielberg’s decision to depict the actual slaughter of the Israeli athletes (bizarrely interwoven with an especially vulgar sex scene) at the end of the film rather than at the beginning. The effect is to jumble cause and consequence; to make the massacre seem like a response to Israeli atrocities; to turn Munich into just another stage in the proverbial cycle of violence, or what Mr. Spielberg calls a “response to a response.” Mr. Spielberg has said he made this film as a “tribute” to the fallen athletes. What he has mainly accomplished is to trivialize their murder.

“If you start with an ax to grind,” Mr. Kushner recently told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, “then you write a bad play or movie.” To watch “Munich” is to recognize the truth of that statement.

UPDATE: Screenwriter and pundit Roger Simon weighs in with a review of “Munich”. Where Bret Stephens dealt mainly with the typically Hollywood political slant of the film, Simon takes apart the craft (and in closing supports the above Bret Stephens review):

I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of “Munich,” a movie I didn’t expect to like and didn’t. As almost everyone agrees, Steven Spielberg is an extraordinarily gifted and accomplished filmmaker, especially when he is dealing with popular entertainment themes as in “E.. T.” and “Jaws”. He is not in any sense, however, a sophisticated thinker and “Munich” is an ultimately banal film, completely out of his range.

. . .

For what it’s worth, I agree with most of Bret Stephens’ review in the WSJ Sunday, but I don’t think Spielberg is any sense anti-Semitic. He’s just boring.