Inspire Creativity

Munich - A Spielburg documentary, as slow and painful as a Clint Eastwood film

Posted by kevin Wed, 04 Jan 2006 17:20:05 GMT

Sorry if I offend any Spielberg or Clint Eastwood lovers out there.

If you’re going to have a movie with a heavy moral, 1) make it easy so that everyone will understand it, and 2) tie it into a movie storytelling experience. And don’t forget #3 – Get an editor!

This movie read like a documentary. The characters are incompetent, don’t question what they’re doing, and are just plain stupid.

Spielberg wants to show us that terrorism is bad, that these people are stupid for not questioning why they are doing things – but I worry that whoever sees their movie will read their own agenda into it. I spoke to a man in the theater after and he couldn’t figure out why they showed the twin towers in the end (the obvious, to me, answer being that this is a movie about Terrorism & America). He thought it was trying to show that if we were in that case, we’d do terrorism too. NO NO NO! It’s trying to show how stupid we are for terrorizing Iraq for a bunch of Afghanis who terrorized us. “An eye for an eye will blind the world” is one of my favorite quotes.

A reason i was so frustrated with this is that it’s the perfect time for a movie like this – Terrorism is something the US is intimately familiar with right now, from what was done to us a few short years ago, and the idea of retaliation makes the news every day with events in Iraq.

One of my pet peeves of directors is when they waste tons of time on beautiful pan shots of scenery. This movie moved too slow for me! I wish he worked more philosophy into the anti-patriotic and anti-religious statement that terrorism is stupid, and that you can’t trust who gives you orders when you don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t even know who the people they are killing are! The matrix and a few other recent movies show how well philosophy can be worked into a story.

Also, there was no beginning/middle/end to this. The main character spirals into insanity in the end, but it’s not clear whether this is fatal or he is able to recover. Anti-patriotism is evident, and the use of “no” powerful, however, the relationship between him and his boss is not made clear, and there is no closure.

If you’ve seen this movie, and have any defense for it, feel free to comment. It had great emotion, decent cinematography, but in my mind was a pretty bad movie.