Fifty years ago this month, 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team were taken hostage and executed by a Palestinian terrorist group in the host city of Munich.
Munich Games, an engrossing new multilingual Sky original series, doesn’t directly revisit the massacre — as Steven Spielberg did in his 2005 film Munich — so much as play out under the dark, lingering clouds of the tragedy. Set in present-day Munich, this adrenalised spy thriller from Fauda screenwriter Michal Aviram revolves around a fictional (if grimly plausible) scenario in which an anniversary-commemorating football match between a local team and a Tel Aviv club becomes the target of a violent plot.
After Oren Simon (Yousef Sweid), a Mossad agent stationed in Germany, discovers that an Islamist cell has developed a detailed simulation of the planned attack, the intelligence services are left with just six days to thwart the extremists. “We have to join efforts on this one,” a senior Israeli official tells his German counterpart. “Don’t we always?” he responds, his naive question met with a wry smile.
While the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict (as well as the Holocaust) is an ever-present backdrop, the six-part series is careful not to buckle under the enormity of that history. Instead, much of the tension here interestingly stems from the strains between supposed allies. Oren, brusque and impatient, is vexed by German bureaucracy and is distrusting of his new partner, Maria (Seyneb Saleh). She, in turn, balks at Mossad’s routine disregard for protocol. Distracted by their mutual suspicions the two threaten to destabilise the delicate operation through their lapses in judgment. A scene in which both are exposed while making an unsanctioned visit to a potential lead is not exactly a showcase of top-tier espionage, but it does make for breathless viewing.
Although the series is somewhat overladen with intrigue — there’s a superfluous extortion-cum-kidnapping subplot — it also takes time to introduce (if not fully explore) issues of identity and otherness experienced by Maria, who is of Lebanese origin, Abed (Shadi Mar’i), the Israeli team’s Arab captain, and the club’s owner, Jackie (Shtisel’s Doval’e Glickman), a Munich-born Holocaust survivor.
Despite all the risks, the latter is adamant that the match must go ahead as an opportunity to “heal wounds’‘ and foster a sense of unity and belonging that is so elusive off the pitch. We can only look on, rapt and anxious, to see whether this beautiful game will be saved from a hideous fate.
★★★★☆
Episodes 1-2 on Now now; new episodes weekly on Sky Atlantic, Fridays at 9pm
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