The polarizing greatness of Munich, Steven Spielberg’s answer to Bond

polygon.com:

Steven Spielberg had a specific dream when he began his career in television. Between episodic gigs, he would figure out a way to make a little movie, gain some notoriety, and then James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli would offer him a job to make the next 007 picture. Though he later referred to this as “pie in the sky,” he also said it was “the only franchise [he] cared about.”

But even after his first feature-length project, Duel, garnered attention, Spielberg didn’t get the call. He even hit up actor Roger Moore, hoping the actor would put in a good word. But Broccoli was disinterested. Depending on which interview you read, it was either because Spielberg was still too green, or because he wanted profit sharing. (There are some accounts that the director approached Broccoli a second or even third time, but by this point Broccoli felt he was “too successful.”) Rejected by the property he loved, the director pivoted. “Instead I made the Indiana Jones series,” he’s said several times, arguably one of the bigger sour-grapes flexes of all time.

But you never forget your first love. Decades later, Steven Spielberg finally made his globe-trotting, explosive spy caper, smuggled out under the umbrella of a prestige picture. 2005’s Munich is an Important Movie — a response to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent global war on terror, as well as an attempt to address the contours of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict — and one that courted controversy at the time. But don’t let that scare you off: It absolutely rips.

Munich begins at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where eight members of the Palestinian militant group Black September kidnapped and later killed 11 members of the Israeli national team. What follows is a never completely