The new Steven Spielberg film, one of my most anticipated movies of the year (and how insane is it that the guy is filming a movie in July that will be out this year?) now has a title. It had been going under a variety of names, including Vengeance, which was pretty generic, but it will now be known as Munich. Which really isn’t an improvement.
The title is interesting because my understanding – which may be wrong, and if it is, someone write in and correct me! – is that the film is not so much about the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics as it is about the Israeli response to the terrorists, which didn’t take place in Munich. And that, by the way, really gets me excited because the Israelis killed a number of Palestinians who may or may not have been involved in the Olympics murders, and apparently the Tony Kushner script – at least as it stood the other day, as it has been getting rewritten with regularity – deals with all of that ambiguity head on. A film from the man who brought us Schindler’s List that possibly calls Israel to task? A film from the man whose War of the Worlds brought us some of the most stark 9/11-related imagery possible – and a speech about how occupations never work – that sounds like it may be casting an eye on the indiscriminate prosecution of the War on Terror? Color me excited, and that’s before you factor in Badass Eric Bana playing a Mossad agent.
Munich is due out on December 23.