I deliberately left the film to watch after the novel, wondering how Spielberg would show the huge shock he felt while reading through the film. The film simplifies the novel and focuses on the reflection on "repressing violence with violence". At this point, it is naturally difficult to explore the problems in a richer level than the novel. Taking the intertwined and bad situation in the Middle East as the theme, the literary works of The advantage is that the brush strokes can be spread out, and everyone living in it is a vivid footnote to the land, and at the same time, everyone has their own different survival difficulties.
In fact, when reading novels, one of the questions I often think about is: To what extent can personal interests be buried in the face of one's own country? Does the justice of the process and the justice of the means matter, when one considers themselves to have a just purpose?
The hero, Afner, has a "rooted and Miaohong" mother and an unidentified but apparently secret agent father. Afner, who lived in Frankfurt for a while when he was a child, always misses Europe deeply, and is close to everything there. Ominously enveloped him, grilled him, numbed him, blew sand into his eyes. Unlike the air of Europe, calm, soft, ordinary, elegant, made him remember.” Nevertheless, for Israel, he was full of patriotic zeal. He accepted the task of assassinating the Palestinian dignitaries who planned the "Munich Massacre", ignoring the admonition of his father, a former agent who had made great achievements for the country but had a bleak night, "My My son can't repeat my mistakes." After the meeting with the national leaders, Afner, who was full of honor and mission, became the person in charge of the assassination.
Things are often out of your control. Afner and his team are increasingly aware that it is absolutely impossible to 100% ensure that innocent people are not harmed in an assassination operation, which has caused them to sink into a deep sense of guilt and justice for their actions. In suspicion, at the same time, for every terrorist death, new personnel will take their place, and the means may be more vicious than the predecessors. What is the point of risking their lives to seek revenge? And as the people on the blacklist were eliminated one by one, the initial sense of accomplishment quickly turned into a sense of crisis. It turned out that it was so easy to remove one person, and the Palestinians must be able to easily kill themselves. The huge terror never stops. torment their nerves. Efforts to overcome the fear and also try to suppress disappointment at the unfriendly bureaucracy of the Seri authorities.
Afner's father was obviously treated unfairly by the state, but in Afner's mother's opinion "you are an Israeli, you do your duty. You don't expect anything in return. The Jews have a country, and this is In return for you."
It was not enough for Afner to have Israel. He also has a desire for a happy and peaceful life. At the end of the mission, exhausted, he decided to immigrate to the United States. Although he made up his mind that if there was a war or something, he would take the first flight to go back to work for Israel, and he would still feel guilty. To become a citizen of another country is a very big decision for any individual, but for an Israeli it is even more important. It is not just a salute to another flag , speaking another language, or paying taxes to another group of bureaucrats. For Israelis, it means returning to the diaspora, abandoning the Jewish homeland and betraying the faith of thousands of dead Jews.”
How does suffering end? How is peace possible?
Sadly, the answer may not be optimistic. At least there is currently no force that can solve it. A few years ago, I would still think about the power of the human heart, which can be powerful enough to end all the ugliness, but now it is really naive to think about it.
George Jonas also has his own comment on this, very insightful, quoted here:
In my opinion, the usefulness of counter-terrorism cannot be determined by what problems it solves or what problems it does not solve. Armed conflict never solves any problems unless there is a decisive military battle like Waterloo. Even if there is a "Waterloo", the final solution will take a generation or two.
The world map is drawn with blood. This is a sad fact. If peace is not imposed on both sides of the war by greater force from outside, then the frontier is determined entirely by victory or exhaustion. As long as the fighting spirit survives, the nation has no choice but to fight every day, regardless of whether a day's fighting "fixes" anything. Otherwise, it can only be surrender and defeat. The older countries are hypocritical, our ancestors painted their own map on the earth with their blood, and the younger countries were allowed to refrain—either morally or in specific matters—if they If they were restrained like this in the past, they would not have appeared and would not have survived.
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