7 Days in Entebbe

In the Summer of 1976, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (specifically their splinter External Operations group, whose actions weren’t sanctioned by the Front as a whole) and Revolutionary Cells, an affiliated German revolutionary organization, hijacked Air France Flight 139 en route to Paris following a stopover in Athens, complete with 258 hostages (crew included).  The hijackers forced the plane to land for refueling in Benghazi before heading off to Entebbe, Uganda.  Their aim was to coerce the Israeli government to release 53 prisoners (all either Palestinians or militants fighting on behalf thereof) and pay a ransom of $5 million.  Befitting their political aims, the hijackers wound up releasing 148 of the hostages, all of whom were non-Israeli, while the remainder would be held for the duration.

As a response, in order to maintain their tradition of non-negotiation with terrorists, Israel organized a commando raid of the airport at Entebbe.  A week after the plane had touched down in Uganda, Operation Thunderbolt went into action, and the commandos were able to eliminate the hijackers and secure the hostages, though three hostages were killed during the firefight.  Only one commando was killed, Yonaton Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister (and fellow commando) Benjamin Netanyahu.

This dramatic raid has been dramatized on film before, including Raid on Entebbe and the Israeli Operation Thunderbolt, both dropping the year after the incident, and it returns to the big screen in 7 Days in Entebbe.

This version is less raw than its ’70s-born predecessors, opting for a far more stylized and encompassing approach:  Rather than resting fully on the bare events of the hijacking and subsequent raid, the film shows the inspiration of the German revolutionaries who aided in the hijacking, the tension the crisis created (and exacerbated) within the Israeli cabinet, and the philosophical and ideological byproducts of the whole affair for those involved and the Israeli people as a whole.  It’s a bold move, honestly, especially considering the tried and tested method of focusing on the action, but it’s one that helped provide some much-needed context for the event and pressed home the underlying ideas that peace requires negotiation and that idealogues (be they revolutionaries, politicians, or everyday people) are more likely to hinder the cause of peace than help it, regardless of their intentions.

Headlining the drama are Rosamund Pike and Daniel Brühl as the German hijackers, Lior Ashkenazi as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Eddie Marsan (formerly of The World’s End, inter alia) as Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres, Nonso Anozie (from Cinderella and Get Santa) as Ugandan President Idi Amin, Ben Schnetzer as one of the commandos, Zina Zinchenko as his dancer girlfriend back home, and Denis Ménochet as the plane’s engineering officer.  All of them do a splendid job, bringing the right amount of humanity and pathos to their respective roles, allowing the audience to actually become at least a bit invested in their characters.  There are hindrances to this, though, as Anozie only has a couple scenes and the plot thread involving Schnetzer and Zinchenko is relegated to a minor, background participant, but these don’t fully drag the proceedings down, thankfully.

Aside from director José Padilha’s immediate stylistic flourishes, including the use of bold text as subtitles and some unique staging thereof, his most prominent and striking decision was the deep inclusion of a particular dance piece.  Bookending the film’s action – as well as providing the majority of Zinchenko’s screentime – is a rendition of “Echad Mi Yodea”, specifically the version from Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin’s Kyr.  Unlike Padilha’s use of more modern music in Robocop (anyone remember the training sequence set to “Hocus Pocus” by Focus?), this musical utilization had some actual depth and heft to it:  Normally a traditional Passover inclusion (and a cumulative song, not all that dissimilar in form to “The Twelve Days of Christmas”), “Echad” is united here with nigh-tribal rhythms (courtesy of Israeli rockers Tractor’s Revenge) and a highly physical form of dance involving convulsive thrusts and the gradual shedding of clothes.  Taken together, the piece serves as a commemoration of sorts of the formation of the state of Israel, a country born of Judaism and the horrors of the Holocaust (to which the stripping refers, as the clothes build up into a pile reminiscent of those seen in concentration camps and, later, in memorials).  The piece, both the dance and the rollicking song, beckons the audience back in time and into the mindset of the Israelis on the ground and in the government buildings, all striving for unity and survival.  Meanwhile, idealogues on all sides threaten this goal: the Palestinians, who look to reclaim some of their homeland; the revolutionaries, who aid them in the name of freedom and dignity while ignoring the same principles as exhibited by, in this case, Israel; the in-fighting in the Israeli government between the Peres-headed hawks and the Rabin-led doves; and the conservative- and militaristically-minded Israelis, represented in the film by the commandos, especially Netanyahu.  As all of these ideologies collide, the soul of Israel hangs in the balance, “Echad Mi Yodea” thundering throughout.  It’s a powerful sentiment, and the sounds and movement of the piece really drive the point home for the audience.

Still, things do come off a touch shaky.  Despite the inclusion of several context-providing points of view, many of the characters simply stand in for their respective ideologies, showing little or no signs of wavering.  While this does feed into the point illustrated above, it also leads to some slightly stiff dialogue, writer Gregory Burke (known for his scripting of ’71) opting to let his characters spout rhetoric that is all too obvious to the audience, even if their points had already been established.  In addition, some of the characters, particularly the Israeli government officials, aren’t given any backstory directly, so the audience is left to pick up on their perspectives based solely on the film’s focus, which keeps us from understanding them better (ie. why was Peres so against negotiation and Rabin so ardent on moving away from military intervention?).  These deficiencies, though, don’t derail the experience for me, but they do leave something to be desired.

Nonetheless, this film is a worthy portrayal of the crisis, both as an incident of terrorism and a symbolic struggle for the soul of Israel (and something of a statement on the international political climate of the time).  It’s more striking and engaging than the previous dramatizations of this event, and it doesn’t leave any room for real boredom to develop.  It’s definitely worthy of a watch, though it can wait to be a rental if the material doesn’t sound entirely engaging to you.

Now I’ve gotta deal with having “Echad” stuck in my head for a few days…