After a few consecutive films of fluff and fun, Spielberg’s
next move was to tell another serious story with Munich. Based on the book Vengeance it tells the story of actions
taken by Mossad in the wake of the tragic murder of Israeli athletes at the
1972 Munich Olympics. Eric Bana’s Avner
leads a team of disavowed agents to exact bloody revenge on the architects of
the massacre, operating under no flag and with constant paranoia biting their
heels. I don’t fully understand them,
and won’t pretend to for an article about films, so I won’t get into the
politics of the situation, but Spielberg’s overall point seems to be that
piling wrong after wrong will never make right.
He certainly doesn’t put an argument forward for Palestine, but at no
point is Israel made to look heroic.
Spielberg does a fine job of maintaining paranoia
throughout: Matheiu Alamric’s smirking informant’s loyalties and intensions are
never clear, particularly when Avner befriends his father; there are tensions
within the team, who are thrown together (from the world’s finest character
actors) and don’t entirely trust one another; there are opposing layers of
espionage at work, best exemplified when CIA spooks interrupt a rain-drenched
hit; and the whole film has an air of sweaty intensity. A weather reporter would describe Munich’s atmosphere as ‘close’.
Bana does fine work as the troubled Avner. Not an Israeli by birth, his mission troubles
him but he shows remarkable persistence, yet he fears for his family’s safety
from all sides. Moving from Jerusalem to
New York, Avner voices the film’s theme of the importance of home, but also
rejects the idea that his actions were in any way heroic. Spielberg’s broken family motif is two-fold:
Avner is an absentee father during his mission, but also struggling to hold
together his team, which consists of Daniel Craig’s hot headed driver, Ciaran
Hinds’ frustrated clean up guy and Mathieu Kassovitz’ nervous demolitions man,
who may or may not have messed up one of the hits.
Munich displays a
rare Spielberg feat: he doesn’t spoon feed you the answers. Several characters have murky motivations,
governments more so, with none portrayed as a good guy (the CIA is implied to
be doing business with a known terrorist), and you are never given a moral
absolute to follow. Even the team,
seeking revenge for crimes against Israel, question their motivations at times,
and the absolute fruitlessness of their endeavours is laid bare when it is
revealed that for every person they kill, somebody worse takes their
place. The one answer he gives, subtly
presented in what is probably his best, most restrained ending, is that
violence does not solve anything. One of
my favourite Spielberg films, just not one I want to watch very often.
Now to one I want to watch even less. I’ll admit to being less than excited when I
heard that Spielberg was to revisit his most enduring character with 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The
Crystal Skull, but I was still eager to see it. In the ensuing 9 years I had not watched it
again, and there are very good reasons for this.
It’s an absolutely terrible film, with very few redeeming
features, and one which merrily craps on not only my childhood but the legacy
of three fine films. Firstly, the title
is bloody awful. Where the others
conjured images of adventure and danger, Crystal
Skull is grandiose and doesn’t really conjure anything.
With an embarrassed-looking Harrison Ford spouting terrible
dialogue, mostly exposition, where he used to fire off zingers, this lacks everything which made the others so
good. The villains are a major problem:
it’s a given that Nazis were terrible and worthy of a punch, and a human
sacrifice cult, while pissing off all of India, was also suitably horrible. 1950s Communists just don’t carry the same
level of threat (eugenics and genocide vs. public ownership of the means of
production; there’s really no comparison), and Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko’s
is an awful waste of her talents. Ray
Winstone’s character is a waste of space: constantly changing sides for no
apparent reason and using the worst cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke (I
honestly don’t care whether it’s his own accent or not, but it’s awful).
Indy’s sidekicks give Temple
Of Doom’s Short Round a run for his money as the most annoying in film
history. Shia LeBeouf’s
Marlon-Brando-in-The Wild One cliché
is worst of the lot, apparently only there to do the stunts that Harrison Ford
looks too old for (which was all of them).
I couldn’t help but feel sorry for John Hurt, whose Professor Oxley
seems to be a joke at the expense of the mentally ill. In the hands of a lesser actor, you’d be able
to see the embarrassment more clearly.
Only Karen Allen comes away with any credit, spitting smiley sass at
Indy as only she can. It’s a Spielberg
archetype fractured family unit, but could do with a few more clean breaks.
The set pieces are weak: a needless bike chase through a
university, a jungle-set escape with too-obvious Tarzan noises, some easily-evaded
tribal chase guff. There is no insane
mine car chase, no bonkers tank-top fistfight.
And the Indiana Jones trademark of big scary animals is fluffed, too:
after spiders, snakes, millions of bugs, and rats (all real animals),
carnivorous CGI ants just don’t cut it. Most
problems the characters encounter seem to be resolved by pointing a glittery
skull at them.
David Koepp’s script and Spielberg’s ‘it’ll do’ direction
are particularly weak. Much of it looks
and feels cheap, from the opening CGI gopher (fucking why!?!) and obvious
greenscreen sky, to the weird spinny alien nonsense that ruins the climax. The quasi-religious Macguffins of the
previous films are much more effective than some sub X-Files alien bollocks, which are just harder to care about and
carry and ill-established threat. Worst
of all, is how it wipes its arse with the legacy of a great character: every
time John Williams’ classic theme pops up on the soundtrack, it seems to
accompany a weak nod to the original films (a breeze running through a spider
web-filled tunnel, the retrieval of a hat, the Ark Of The Covenant now used as
a cheap punch line).
This film is irredeemably awful, probably Spielberg’s worst
(including 1941), and succeeds only in
wasting two hours and forever tarnishing my childhood.
Worst of all: they’re apparently working on no. 5.
