Munich by Paul Bullock

Munich, 1972. At the Summer Olympic Games, a Palestinian terrorist faction, Black September, takes eleven Israeli athletes hostage, eventually killing them. In retaliation Israel send out agents from security service The Mossad, led by Avner (Eric Bana), to track down the perpetrators and kill them.

Much has been said about the suitability of Steven Spielberg to a film as sensitive as Munich. Some have called him a traitor to his faith, others questioned his ability to grasp the intricacies of world politics. But if anything, the director who has turned alien visitations, shark attacks and even the Holocaust into acute family dramas is the perfect man to make the horrors and moral quagmire of terrorism hit home - and, boy, does it ever hit home.

Munich is by some distance Spielberg's most visceral and distressing film yet. Forget the quasi-documentary realism of Schindler’s List or the stark horrors of Saving Private Ryan. Here Spielberg begins with a violent recreation of the Palestineans’ storming of the Israelis’ sleeping quarters and doesn‘t let up from then on. A female assassin is killed coldly through personal rather than political retribution, vulnerable bodies are pierced by hails of bullets and a sensational Eric Bana, in the film‘s most searing but least violent sequence, is reacquainted with his new born child, looking coldly and blankly into her innocent eyes. It’s a film you really need to see twice. Once, to understand the subtly balanced politics at play. And secondly, to appreciate the magnitude of such horrifying images, produced by a director who knows exactly the power they hold.

Long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has bathed the film in a gloomy darkness, giving each new location that Avner and his group visit in their pursuit of the terrorists a different atmosphere, each tenser and more dramatic than the last. Meanwhile, Spielberg himself never allows any scene to settle, forever keeping his camera on edge, editing sharp and violence nasty, short and incredibly brutish.

As such, the film feels more in tune with a classic Hollywood thriller of the 70s like The French Connection or The Conversation - openly referenced here - than Schindler's List. While some will find that and the inevitable historical inaccuracies which go with it hard to accept - perhaps even distasteful - Spielberg makes up for it with an intelligent and nuanced message achieved by homing in on and subverting some of his central themes - fatherhood issues, the innocence of the child - to deliver his most challenging film yet.

But it is another of Spielberg's themes (the sacredness of the home and the family) which ultimately makes Munich the haunting and vital film it is. You could pick any scene, any line which highlights Spielberg’s canny use of this recognisable theme but perhaps Avner’s mother puts it best. With his mission now complete, he sits with her and looking for salvation asks if she wants to know what he’s done. She simply replies, 'no, whatever you've done, whatever it took, a place on this earth, we have a place on this earth.'

Usually this is the cue for Spielberg to spell out the moral of the tale. The time for Schindler's sins to be absolved or Frank Abagnale to find himself a new father figure. But Munich has none of that. These men have secured a home for the timebeing at least. But at what price? What did it take? There are no answers, no solutions, no sentiment and barely even an ending. Just a pause, a momentary breath between one futile loss of life and the next as the camera leaves Avner reflecting on his actions and pans slowly across a 1970s New York, digitally manipulated to feature the World Trade Centre.