A little-known WW2 spy film that has a great Rotten Tomatoes score is now streaming on Netflix. Munich – The Edge of War is a 2021 period spy thriller film based on Robert Harris’s 2017 novel Munich.
The film stars George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, and Jeremy Irons. It’s set at the notorious 1938 Munich conference, convened by Adolf Hitler to force the cringing Western powers into giving him the Czech Sudetenland. Following two minor functionaries on the British and German sides who had been best friends at Oxford, it shows the last-ditch scramble for peace in Europe. On Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of 74 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.8/10.
The website’s consensus reads: “Sharp direction and some outstanding performances make Munich: The Edge of War a gripping historical drama, even though the ending’s no secret.”
Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating “mixed or average” reviews.
The Guardian gave the “ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama” three stars, saying that “the fact that you know what happens in the end is no bar to enjoyment”.
The Telegraph said the film “resembles a bumper episode of The Crown, with its poised performances, methodical pacing and sleek nouveau-heritage style”.
This makes sense as director Christian Schwochow directed two episodes of Netflix’s The Crown. One was Tywysog Cymru, about Prince Charles’s investiture, and the other was Coup, about shadowy moves against the Wilson Government while the Queen was out of the country.
One common criticism of the film is its revisionism. Although the main characters are fictionalised for plot development, the author and film have given Chamberlain a more sympathetic role in the build-up to World War 2.
Often deemed a coward for his “appeasement” of Hitler, some modern historians have taken the view that the Munich Conference was a stalling tactic to allow Britain to prepare for an inevitable war with Nazi Germany.