Munich

Friday, February 1, 2008

This is my favorite Spielberg film, and it's a little amazing to me that he made it back-to-back with by far my least favorite of his films.

You know the one I mean. It's the one where silly looking aliens shoot their ray-guns at everyone, yet the tone of the film is dead serious and it constantly appropriates 9/11 imagery to lend a sense of dread and terror. You know, in a stupid fucking movie about spacemen shooting lasers. Totally comparable to 9/11.

It's the one where the world's most famous Scientologist is imprisoned in a giant robot testicle, inside of which a giant tongue crawls out of a giant butthole and tries to eat him and I paid $8 to see it happen.

That one.

The spectre of 9/11 haunts both films. One is a smart, powerful, brilliantly made film that inspires you to really consider a variety of issues on the matter, while still being a masterpiece of the action-thriller genre. The other one is a generic summer blockbuster with really corny dialogue and bad acting that figures it can elicit some sort of default audience response by exploiting disaster imagery and not at all commenting on it.

Wildly different approaches from the same man, is my point.