Munich: The Edge of War — Review: Let’s see the Devil dance
I gotta say, war movies usually are not my favourites, and that’s due to the fact almost all of them come across in the same way: some young lad that leaves his land to fight for the country, usually leaving a young love behind (a motivation to survive and come back). They all end up not with big impacts and not many stand out with my taste — I am very fussy with this genre.
Munich: The Edge of War found itself on my screen by what could be almost an accident. On a quiet evening, I decided to explore the Top 10 UK on Netflix to see if something would catch my attention. Not many of the options were movies and, this picture was the only one sounding decent
The most recent Original Netflix starts at a party in Oxford where we see what turns out to be the biggest allegory of the story to come: a British and a German guy having fun and getting drunk together and both losing their hearts to the same girl, a Jewish free spirit known as Lena.
This dance between British, Germans and Jewish goes into a spy vibe plot situated months before Hitler started what would become one of the most traumatic periods for the world, killing millions of people during WWII. We see here the two friends from the beginning reencounter each other after years in the middle of an operation to prevent the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, from signing an accord to not go to war against Germany.
Hugh Legat is the PM Private Secretary and to him is given the task to meet Paul von Hartmann, his old friend and now the Foreign Relations Secretary in Germany, to obtain information that Hitler is secretly planning to take Europe by force. While the tension suggests heated conflicts and blood, the script leads us through a web of secrets happening backstage of both political sides and shows how messy diplomacy can be.
While Chamberlain expends time and energy to keep defending his position on maintaining peace at any cost and preventing war in English lands, the German Dictator keeps lying to every government saying that all he wants is peace for the continent while advances in his plans to invade Czechoslovakia.
Even though some vehicles affirm that the latest Netflix project is just propaganda to clean Chamberlain’s reputation, I beg to differ. Munich: The Edge of War gives the impression of how unaware the PM was of reality. Even when a rebel that is German gives him information enough to not support Germany on the accords, Chamberlain decides to look away, to teach a ‘political lesson on real life.’
The movie is fiction, of course, but it also plays with the fact that Hitler had almost complete freedom to forge his plans under Europe’s nose. The fact that the background chosen is the Munich Conference is one more provocation in this direction. The meeting happened in real life and, at that point, was still early enough to stop that maniac. One reality that we never gonna meet, though.
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