Munich: The Mission - The Team

Based on a Historic abduction & killings of Israeli Athletes, comes a realist depiction of the events that followed. Sabras will love it.

This is the only featurette that came on my DVD of Munich(I have the feeling that other versions have several, maybe all, of the other ones listed here on the site... especially with how superfluous the menu looks with only one thing on it). It consists of interviews(with Spielberg, producers, the screenwriter and the group of actors), behind the scenes footage and clips of the film. They talk about the script, the casting, the characters, what attracted them to making it, all the research that went into it and, of course, the moral issues that the real event, and the dramatization of it, inevitably brings up. Everyone has something to say. With a running time of 13 minutes, or 30 seconds less sans credits, this is concise and wastes no time. The pacing is good, every bit of information is allowed to sink in. This tells you some of what they discovered about the mission, with the focus mainly on the members of the team, and this does a great job of telling you what they were there for, what their specialties were. This is well-edited. There are no spoilers for the movie, and no offensive material. I recommend this to anyone interested in the subject. 7/10

On the regular and rental editions of the Munich DVD, this is the only extra feature and it's a welcome one. Maybe it's just me not paying attention like I used to, but while I was completely caught up in the film, I kept wondering what exactly was supposed to be some of these guys expertise (apart from Eric Bana). Sure, it's obvious which one of them is building the bombs and Ceasar from Rome is the clean up guy (because Geoffrey Rush mentioned it beforehand) But what were the other two guys doing? James Blond is mostly seen driving a car, but so is the other guy. Lucky for me, this short subject explains it all.

The first half is concerned with the historical background of the mission: who was behind it, who were targeted, the involvement of Israeli leader Golda Meir and how all the different points of views could best be represented in the screenplay. Appearantly people had been struggling with this script for 10 years before the very well read Tony Kushner (who plugs his own Angels in America) took a stab at writing about a 5 man team of assassins without resorting to the "obvious sociopath" clichés.

Steven Spielberg explains he basically cast Eric Bana while watching Ang Lee's Hulk with his kids, then decided to find another 4 actors with looks and acting techniques as far away from Bana as possible (a lesion learned from "1941", where he had two black haired men in uniform fighting over the same girl). During subsequent interviews we learn more details about each team member than than we did in the movie. This is the way the roll-call breaks down: Avner (Eric Bana), Yekke Jew, team leader/assassin; Carl (Ciarán Hinds), German, clean up; Steve (Daniel Craig), South African, transportation; Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), French, explosive expert and Hans (Hanns Zischler), German, document forger.

The two disc version of the movie is packed with more feature's on editing, recreating the era and survivor's memories (no mean feat considering the extremely short production schedule that was kept in order to release the film in time for Oscar consideration). But for me, this one alone was a helpful addition to an impressive film and a reminder that, with DVD extra's and IMDb, all answers to life's questions are available at your finger tips.

8 out of 10