Pun Salad

Sometimes I think I should automatically preface all these little movie notes with "Well, I just got around to seeing X."

Well, I just got around to seeing Munich. As you may have heard, it's the story of a small group of agents set out to kill those directly and indirectly responsible for the murder of Israel's Olympic athletes in 1972. Not content with being a simple thriller, there's piles of dark moral ambiguity and angst, as the good guys find out that actually going out and killing people is not similar at all to your typical Schwarzeneggerian movie plot. But overall, even if you find all the handwringing a little tedious, it's still a very competent flick, because, well, it's Steven Spielberg, after all.

The movie hits the viewer over the head with very big and unsubtle references to the "replacements" for the terrorists the good guys are killing. This very sophisticated worldview regards terrorists kind of like an infinite box of Kleenex: as one is used up, another one inevitably pops up to take its place, indistinguishable from the original. Waah! It's all so futile!

Spielberg has a little "preface" on the DVD, which (frankly) comes off as very defensive against charges that the movie was too much on the anti-revenge/moral equivalence side, and too fact-challenged. He makes much of the fact that the book on which the movie was based has "never been refuted." That's not very convincing. Wikipedia has an entry (spoiler-filled) that summarizes the controversy.