The Tragedy of the Munich Games

The Tragedy of the Munich Games

The Tragedy of the Munich Games
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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Jim McKay, Peter Jennings, Roone Arlege
Brand: Team Marketing
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 56 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-20
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Arts Alliance Amer

Movie Reviews of The Tragedy of the Munich Games

Movie Review: befuddled reporting
Summary: 3 Stars

What you're looking at here is an hour-long documentary broadcast a few years ago by ABC News on the infamous kidnapping and murder of 11 members of the Israeli olympic team in Munich in 1972, an event which many commentators have cited as marking the birth of international terrorism.

A passable effort, it features interviews with many people who were involved in the action (no Palestinians, though), from retired German police officers, to Peter Jennings, to the orphans of the slain athletes. There is also plenty of news footage taken from broadcasts of the time. But, perhaps mercifully, there are no "re-enactments" with costumed actors, a common phenomenon in such documentaries these days.

As with many products of the mainstream media, you can count on this documentary to totally fail to clarify what was really going on: why did those Palestinian gunmen think it okay to to murder a bunch of Jews? Why were they so angry? What did they want? How did this situation come to be? The viewer is left to fill in the blanks for himself.

What's most hilarious (albeit in a sick way) is the lack of interviews of virutally any Arabs on the matter. This is because, despite the saccharine, conciliatory conclusion of the documentary (in which we are treated to recent footage of the orphans of the murdered athletes applauding the Palestinian olympic team), to this day, the average Arab considers what happened in Munich in 1972 a great victory. When the surviving terrorists were shipped back to Libya after only a couple of months of captivity in Germany, they were hailed as conquering heroes. And that was just Libya!

Knowing this, producers were evidently hard-pressed to find any Arabs that would speak of Munich 1972 in condemnatory terms. In the end, they couldn't.

Summary of The Tragedy of the Munich Games

A documentary look at the story told in Steven Spielberg's simultaneously released drama MUNICH, this release compiles much of the news footage taken during the 1972 Olympics hostage crisis. The world watched with bated breath as Arab terrorists killed two Israeli athletes and held nine others hostage. There on the scene were newscaster Peter Jennings, sports journalist Jim McKay, producers Roone Arledge and Doug Wilson, and author Simon Reeve. Here, they recount their firsthand experiences of the event.

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