WELL-WORN HISTORY
The Entebbe hijacking receives yet another cinematic treatment not up to the occasion
Neither revolutionary nor reactionary, 7 Days In Entebbe ends up a dull hijack thriller with a muddled political posture. The film, by Narcos director Jose Padilha, tells the true story of when in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German hijackers forced an Air France flight, bound for Tel Aviv with over 200 passengers on-board, to divert and land in Idi Amin-ruled Uganda, precisely at the Entebbe Airport, where they keep the passengers in an abandoned terminal for seven days.
The idea was to pressure the Israeli government, led by Yitzhak Rabin, to release Palestinian political prisoners. As it has been told before in documentaries and feature films — you can call what follows a spoiler, though the history of the world is one big spoiler for all innocent viewers — the episode ended with the Israeli commandos staging a daring operation that succeeded in rescuing most of the hostages and killing all the hijackers.
As a thriller/action movie, this one is run-of-the-mill at best and enervating at worst. There are two well-known faces — Rosamund Pike and Daniel Bruhl — playing left-wing German “revolutionaries”, and they walk around with guns looking dazed, like chic bourgeoisie playing Red Army radicals to appease their own conscience. As the story begins, those blank stares in Bruhl’s and Pike’s eyes look like something intended for their characters
Starring Rosamund Pike, Daniel Bruhl, Lior Ashkenazi, Eddie Marsan Directed by Jose Padilha
— white intellectuals who decide to pick up guns while determined not to become like the Nazis — but as the film progresses and they’re stuck in the terminal with the passengers, those empty looks betray exactly that: emptiness. The confusion they harbour doesn’t elicit from us ideological sympathy but pure boredom.
Which begs us to consider the deeper stance of the film. 7 Days In Entebbe tries to be “fair”, to sketch the chaotic history in the Middle East after World War II that led to the creation of Israel, which in effect rendered millions of Palestinians stateless. It explains that the Palestinian freedom fighters were joined by various left-wing warriors from Europe and elsewhere who saw the injustice being perpetrated on them. It even mentions an Israeli massacre of Palestinians, which in the context of the film drives one of the hijackers to do what he’s doing in Entebbe. The film’s matter-of-fact title is also less vain than the Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster 1976 film Victory At Entebbe, released less than a year after the incident.
All this is fine and fair. But the problem — one that makes the film seem naive and pseudo-liberal — is that there’s no way to tell this story except from the point of view of the Israelis, who are the rescuers and winners of this episode. And once the story goes through that lens, it can’t avoid catching a sense of triumphalism. Worse, the film’s first half is seen mostly from the eyes of the two Germans — presumably to represent the hijackers’ side — but, first, they’re the least interesting characters despite their sad mix of radicalism and guilt (Germans taking Jews hostages; sounds familiar?), and, second, they’re two empty vessels of half-baked revolutionary ideas that almost belittle the true cause of the Palestinians. Why does the film, or at least half of it, have to be told from their points of view instead of, say, that of a Palestinian hijacker, since
Rosamund Pike and Daniel Bruhl’s empty looks betray exactly that: emptiness 7 Days In Entebbe
there’s one in the group? Besides having Pike and Bruhl on the poster and thus securing (some) marketability, I can’t think of anything.
It’s the smaller actors who impress. Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi plays Yitzak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister bound by his nation’s principle that there will never be a negotiation with terrorists. He’s portrayed — charismatically and sensitively — as a man whose decision is shaped by history as well as political circumstance, and who always believes in negotiation rather than force. (Years later, of course, he would champion negotiation with Yasser Arafat.) Shimon Peres (British actor Eddie Marsan) is portrayed here as a hawkish defence minister bent on launching the operation despite its risks. These two actors’ scenes together are mostly in a meeting room, two politicians locking horns while trying to save their country as well as their political future. That in real life, Rabin and Peres would later work together in peace negotiation was a development that couldn’t have been foretold by what we see in this film.