Steven Spielberg's drama about the Israeli response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The most-morally-difficult film of his career.
The film opens with a partial reconstruction of the September 1972 Munich Olympics attack — Palestinian militants from Black September take eleven Israeli athletes hostage; the rescue attempt ends with all athletes killed. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorises a covert operation to identify and kill the eleven men Israeli intelligence believes are responsible. Avner Kaufmann, a young Mossad operative, is selected to lead a five-man team operating outside official Israeli channels.
The film tracks the team's operations across approximately two years and multiple European cities. The targets are progressively identified and killed; the team progressively unravels under the psychological weight of the work. The film closes with Avner having relocated to Brooklyn, having lost his trust in the Israeli intelligence apparatus that recruited him, and uncertain whether the campaign has, in any structural sense, made Israel safer. The closing shot is the World Trade Center towers visible across the East River from Brooklyn — a deliberate framing of the long historical line connecting the 1972 events to subsequent terror cycles.
Munich is, by general critical consensus, the most-morally-complex film in Steven Spielberg's career. The film refuses to take a clean political position on the question of whether the Israeli operation was justified. Spielberg's structural argument is that the operation produced both genuine costs (the lives of the named targets, the psychological destruction of the operatives, the broader cycle of violence the killings extended) and genuine benefits (the disruption of Black September's operational capacity, the demonstration that Israel would respond to terrorism against its citizens). The film does not, in any conventional sense, resolve which side of the balance is heavier.
The structural ambiguity produced significant reception controversy on release. Critics on the Israeli political right argued the film softened the operation's necessity. Critics on the Palestinian and anti-occupation political left argued the film centred Israeli moral burden while marginalising the Palestinian context that produced Black September in the first place. Both positions had textual support. The film's defenders argued that the ambiguity is the structural seriousness — that Spielberg refused to flatten a genuinely difficult historical situation into clean moral framing. Almost two decades later, the film's standing has grown; the contemporary critical consensus is that Munich is among Spielberg's strongest serious-cinema productions.
The screenplay was written primarily by Tony Kushner (Angels in America, the Pulitzer-winning playwright) with Eric Roth contributing. Kushner's specific working approach — extended dialogue scenes that interrogate the characters' moral positions, attention to the historical-political context the events emerge from, willingness to give significant screen time to characters whose worldview the film does not endorse — shaped the film's structural argument. The Kushner-Spielberg collaboration would extend to Lincoln (2012), The Fabelmans (2022), and West Side Story (2021).
What the Kushner screenplay achieves is the willingness to take Palestinian perspectives seriously without endorsing them. The film includes several extended sequences in which Avner's team interacts with Palestinian operatives or sympathisers; the Palestinian characters are given substantive dialogue that articulates their own political position. The technique requires the audience to hold competing moral framings simultaneously rather than receiving a clean Israeli-perspective narrative. Few major-studio productions have, before or since, attempted this kind of multi-perspective political-thriller framing.
Eric Bana's Avner is, by general critical consensus, the strongest dramatic lead of his career. The role required Bana to play a young Israeli operative whose initial competence and patriotism progressively dismantle across the operation's two-year arc. The performance is built on small physical details — the gradual hollowing of his face, the increasing tremor in his hands, the deteriorating sleep that the film tracks across multiple scenes.
The supporting cast includes Daniel Craig (in his last major role before becoming James Bond), Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciarán Hinds, and Hanns Zischler. The five-man team's progressive disintegration is the film's emotional spine; the casting required actors who could sustain ensemble cohesion across the runtime while also delivering individual character arcs. Spielberg's casting of relatively-low-profile international actors rather than major stars produced a register of ensemble work that conventional star-driven production would not have achieved.