I was pretty surprised when this movie was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and I’m still a little unsure if it’s worthy of a place next to Crash, Good Night, And Good Luck., etc. Spielberg has never been colder than he is with this one, and he makes his intentions crystal clear (if they weren’t already implicit) with a final shot featuring the World Trade Center in the background. It sounds much, much more of a cheap shot than it is – I found that Munich screams “Think!” more powerfully than any other politically-minded movie I’ve seen in the past year, and not just in terms of the obvious 9/11 parallel.

One thing I thought I’d find myself turned off by is the movie’s length – at nearly 3 hours it’s almost twice the length a movie of this type should really be, I think, but Spielberg makes the time fly terrifically, if terrifyingly. Delivering the full horror of the Munich massacre in fleeting, horrifying flashbacks, we never lose focus of what and who exactly are being avenged. Spielberg has rarely been as violent as he is here – while Saving Private Ryan may have been hyper-realistic, assaulting the audience’s senses with sound and visceral camera-work, I’m more likely to have nightmares about the chilling, bloody images here … in fact, I think I already have. We’re not spared the brutality of ‘the good guys’ (if they can be called that) either … by far the most stomach-churning scene to me comes close to the end and it’s one of the ‘bad guys’’ deaths.

All in all, this isn’t a movie I’ll be watching many times in the future. It’s a movie that was crying out to be made though, and Spielberg chose the perfect time to do it. Heavy-handed a move though it may be to use this story as an analogy of the current state of affairs post 9/11, it’s the kind of cinema I want desperately to see more of. It’s because it’s heavy-handed, I guess. It turns on the emotion. Unlikely an eventuality though it may be, I certainly wouldn’t be disappointed if this carried away Best Picture on Sunday.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 11:20 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.