7 Days in Entebbe (2018)

[James Luckard]

Coming July 3 from Universal:


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B5W1TRJ/

Special Features:

The Entebbe Team - Featurette
Inside the Raid - Featurette
Additional Dance Sequences

My favorite film of the year so far is this thriller from Brazilian director José Padilha.

It's a brilliant dramatization of the 1976 hijacking of an Air France airliner to Uganda by terrorists. The film got unfairly scathing reviews, to my mind. I think this is largely because the filmmakers made the bold, daring choice to make the terrorists the protagonists. That's not to say the movie endorses what they're doing, far from it, but the filmmakers clearly looked at the three previous films about this event and wanted to approach it differently. I'm not sure if this is a spoiler, since it's a historical event, but

[Show spoiler]survivors recount that, at the end, in the couple of minutes as the Israelis approached to rescue them, the terrorists had every opportunity to execute them all, and chose not to. That's amazing to me, and clearly to the filmmakers here too.

To my mind, when you choose who to focus on in a film, you should find the person or people who change the most over the course of the story. The hostages get plenty of screen time, but they're innocent victims, who they are doesn't change. The Israelis also get loads of screen time, they're certainly not short changed, but in the end they are trying to rescue the hostages, they don't change either. The two German terrorists change enormously, starting as upper-middle class "revolutionaries" who decide to join the "international struggle" and only gradually realizing that their fantasies are very different from the reality of pointing guns at innocent people and threatening them with death. The film gives a fascinating look at 70s radicalism, and what it meant. The script is really quite brilliant in examining this man and this woman, and figuring out what drove them to this monstrous crime, and how they felt about it. I think this made people uncomfortable, but to me it's vital that we try and understand criminals, so we can get to the cause of their crimes.

The film also gives a fantastic portrait of the conflicts within the Israeli government about how to deal with the hijacking, and the amazing story of the rescue.

In addition, Padilha makes the audacious choice, from the opening shot of the film and throughout it, to intercut large segments with a modern interpretive dance piece that speaks to the issues the film examines. Some people were turned off by this, but I found it a masterful choice.

This film reminds me of one of my favorite films ever, 1977's Black Sunday, which similarly made its fictional terrorists its protagonists, and tried to understand their motivations, while never for a moment shying away from showing that they were murderous criminals. I highly recommend this film. It would be a great companion piece to Spielberg's masterpiece Munich, with which it shares a great deal of DNA.