According to the Wall Street Journal Steven Spielberg’s next big project is a movie called Vengeance and will star Eric Bana (Last seen in Troy, and the star of Hulk) as an agent for Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, hunting down the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murders of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics Games in Munich. Due out in 2006, sources say it will be his most important film since Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
You can read more about Operation Wrath of God, as it was known, here.
The 1986 movie, Sword of Gideon, was about this very incident. Although good, it could have definitely used Spielberg’s touch. I’m looking forward to this version.
As with nearly everything Speilberg directs (and some of what he produces), it’ll be interesting to see what he does with this material. And, I happen to really appreciate the work of Eric Bana, despite some criticism. All things considered, seems like a very potent project.
Unlike Sword Of Gideon this new film will be more action packed and authentic. I have read the book and I was quite simply amazed. I have also read a paper done by a US government employee Alexander Callahan which deals with this as well – how the Israelis pioneered the use of “independant covert action teams”. Teams designed to be almost fully autonomous and allowed to complete their assigned tasks on their own and in their own time, using or improvising every method or tool at their disposal. Needless to say the particular hit team in question, that was the subject of the book “Vengeance”, by George Jonas, proved to be a huge success, despite a 60 percent casualty rate. That is, out of five that made up the team, by the time Mossad had ended the mission, there were only two left. One of whom, “Avner”, became the source of information for the book. BTW in case you were wondering the real name of the team leader “Avner” is Juval Aviv. He is a security and business consultant based in New York.