MUNICH



Watched Steven Spielberg's Munich last night.

What struck me most was the amateurish, almost primitive, level of the terrorists and the Israeli deep undercover assassins who hunted them down. The fanatical nihilism of today, present in terrorists like Zarqawi, was absent in the Black September hostage takers. We view them as bad men or enemies but as understandable ones and not as incomprehensible aliens.

Also missing was the cool, high-tech, hypertrained, professionalism of modern counterterrrorism units. Things are figured out on the fly, bombs are jerry-rigged from WWII surplus, basic tradecraft (in terms of espionage, mission security) are ignored. For example, after Avner is approached by an attractive "swallow" in a hotel bar and realizes that his group's cover is blown, instead of getting everybody out of the hotel and disappearing, he lets one of his team members go hang with her while he goes to his room and places a direct call to the apartment in New York where he is hiding his wife and child. Not something I wager many intelligence or counterterrorism agents would do today.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the film, which has been criticized by former members of both Black September and the Mossad but it is dubious that Spielberg could have satisfied both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute plus neutral historians and still produced a watchable, entertaining, film. I give it...three stars !  ¶ 7:36 PM