Two films separated by nearly two decades tell a remarkably similar story on paper: a democratic state, wounded by terrorism, authorizes covert assassination squads to hunt and kill those responsible on foreign soil, and a filmmaker turns that covert campaign into a major commercial release consumed by millions of citizens whose tax money funded the real operations. Spielberg’s Munich, released in 2005, dramatized Israel’s Operation Wrath of God following the 1972 Olympic massacre. Dhurandhar, released two decades later, dramatized India’s shadow war against Pakistan-based terrorists following decades of cross-border attacks. Both films depict their nation’s intelligence operatives executing targets in foreign cities. Both films were massive cultural events in their home countries. Yet the two films could not be more different in what they ask their audiences to feel about the killing, and that difference reveals something profound about how each democracy processes the moral weight of state-sanctioned violence.

The Film’s Version

Steven Spielberg’s Munich opens with a meticulously reconstructed sequence of the September 1972 hostage crisis at the Olympic Village, intercut with the agonizing television coverage that nine hundred million viewers watched in real time. The film establishes the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes not as a distant abstraction but as an intimate, physical horror, showing the athletes’ bodies, their fear, the fumbled rescue at Furstenfeldbruck airbase. From that wound, the film’s protagonist Avner Kaufman emerges: a young Mossad officer tasked by Prime Minister Golda Meir with leading a covert squad to assassinate eleven Palestinians believed responsible for planning the Munich attack. Avner accepts the mission with patriotic conviction. He believes in the righteousness of Israel’s cause. He believes the men he will kill deserve to die.

Spielberg then spends two and a half hours systematically dismantling every certainty Avner carried into the mission. The first assassination in Rome is messy, emotional, physically revolting. Avner’s hands shake. The target bleeds on the floor of his apartment building. Each subsequent killing becomes simultaneously more professional and more psychologically corrosive. Avner’s team grows efficient at the mechanics of death while growing fragile at the meaning of it. The film’s central dramatic architecture is one of erosion: Avner begins the film as a confident patriot executing a just mission and ends it as a paranoid, morally shattered man who cannot sleep, cannot trust, cannot determine whether the killing has accomplished anything other than producing more killing. His final scene takes place in Brooklyn, where he has retreated from Israel entirely, and ends with a conversation in which his former handler asks him to return. Avner refuses. Behind him, across the East River, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stand against the skyline, a visual coda that transforms the film from a historical drama into a prophecy about the futility of retaliatory violence.

Dhurandhar operates from an entirely different emotional and narrative architecture. Ranveer Singh’s protagonist is a RAW operative deployed to Pakistan to eliminate terrorists responsible for attacks on Indian soil. Where Avner is chosen reluctantly and accepts with conflicted duty, Dhurandhar’s protagonist volunteers with visible eagerness. Where Avner questions the target list, wondering whether the men he kills are truly guilty, the Dhurandhar operative never doubts. Where Avner’s confidence erodes with each killing, the Dhurandhar protagonist’s confidence intensifies. Each successful elimination in Dhurandhar is staged as a moment of national catharsis: the camera celebrates the precision, the audience is invited to experience the satisfaction of justice delivered. The complete analysis of the film’s narrative structure reveals a three-act arc that moves not from confidence to doubt, as Munich does, but from restraint to unleashing, from endurance to action, from victimhood to agency.

The protagonists’ moral trajectories illustrate the fundamental divide between the two films. Avner in Munich is a man who becomes less certain with every piece of intelligence he receives. A pivotal scene places him at a dinner table with a Palestinian militant, and the two men discover that their grievances mirror each other. Avner hears the Palestinian describe his own people’s suffering, and for the first time the clean moral lines of his mission blur. Spielberg frames this scene with deliberate symmetry, the two men equally lit, equally human, their arguments equally compelling. It is a scene designed to make the audience uncomfortable with the simplicity of revenge. Nothing comparable exists in Dhurandhar. The antagonists in Dhurandhar are drawn without ambiguity: they plan attacks, they kill civilians, they exploit Pakistan’s state apparatus for shelter, and they deserve what comes to them. The nationalism debate surrounding Dhurandhar has centered on precisely this absence of moral gray, with critics arguing that the film’s refusal to humanize its antagonists constitutes propaganda and defenders arguing that moral complexity would be dishonest given the real crimes these characters represent.

Spielberg’s directorial choices in Munich serve a philosophy of incremental disillusionment. His camera lingers on the aftermath of violence. When Avner’s team kills a target by planting a bomb in a telephone, the explosion is shown in graphic detail, but the camera stays on the wreckage, on the blood, on the destroyed room, long after the narrative has moved on. Spielberg forces his audience to sit with the consequences. The editing rhythm slows after each killing, creating what film scholars have called a “deceleration of catharsis,” where the expected emotional payoff of revenge is deliberately withheld. Dhurandhar’s directorial vocabulary is the opposite. The camera accelerates during action sequences. Editing is rapid, kinetic, propulsive. The kills are staged with the precision and energy of action-cinema set pieces, and the audience is invited to feel exhilaration rather than unease. Background music swells with patriotic undertones at moments of violence. Where Spielberg withdraws emotional reward, Dhurandhar amplifies it.

The visual grammar of violence in each film reflects and reinforces these opposing philosophies. Munich’s violence is shot with handheld cameras that create instability, disorientation, and a documentary quality that blurs the boundary between cinematic spectacle and recorded reality. Spielberg’s cinematographer Janusz Kaminski uses shallow depth of field during assassination sequences, keeping the killer in focus while the background dissolves into abstraction, a visual metaphor for Avner’s narrowing moral vision. Lighting in Munich’s kill scenes is harsh and naturalistic. There is no beauty in these compositions. The aesthetic vocabulary communicates that killing is an ugly act performed in ugly spaces, and that no amount of institutional authorization can make it visually palatable.

Dhurandhar’s violence is shot with stabilized cameras, precise compositions, and dynamic movement that creates spectacle rather than documentary realism. The cinematography during action sequences borrows from the visual language of the action-thriller genre, using slow-motion at moments of maximum impact, rack-focus pulls that isolate targets in the crosshairs, and carefully choreographed camera movements that follow the protagonist through physical space with balletic precision. Lighting during Dhurandhar’s kill scenes is dramatic and stylized. Shadows create depth. Silhouettes create mystery. The aesthetic vocabulary communicates that killing, when performed by the right person for the right reason, can be beautiful, and that the beauty of the execution reflects the righteousness of the mission.

Color temperature provides another layer of divergence. Munich’s palette is dominated by cool blues, institutional grays, and the washed-out yellows of 1970s European interiors. The film looks cold, institutional, bureaucratic. Even moments of personal warmth between Avner and his wife are shot with muted colors that suggest the emotional range has been compressed by the mission’s psychological weight. Dhurandhar’s palette is warmer, more saturated, and more varied. The film uses the visual richness of South Asian settings, markets, streets, and architectural textures to create a world that feels alive and tactile. This warmth contrasts with the violence embedded within it, but the contrast serves a purpose: it makes the protagonist’s world feel worth defending, and therefore makes his violence feel worth committing.

Sound design further separates the two films’ emotional registers. Munich’s sound during assassination sequences is hyper-realistic: the sound of a suppressed gunshot is not the Hollywood “pfft” but a sharp, concussive crack that startles. Footsteps echo. Breathing amplifies. The sonic landscape during kills is intimate and claustrophobic, trapping the audience inside the violence rather than allowing them to observe it from a comfortable distance. Dhurandhar’s sound design during action sequences is expansive and kinetic. Gunshots are mixed with musical cues. Impacts are emphasized. The sonic landscape creates momentum rather than claustrophobia, propelling the audience through the violence rather than trapping them inside it.

These opposing directorial philosophies produce two fundamentally different audience experiences. Munich’s viewer leaves the theater unsettled, questioning whether the revenge was worth its cost, wondering whether the cycle of violence it depicts has any endpoint. Dhurandhar’s viewer leaves the theater energized, vindicated, feeling that justice has been served and that the nation’s honor has been restored. Both responses are engineered by filmmakers who understood exactly what they were doing. Spielberg chose to interrogate the righteousness of Israeli revenge because he believed the interrogation itself was valuable for a democracy. Dhurandhar’s filmmakers chose to celebrate Indian resolve because they believed the celebration itself was what India needed. Neither filmmaker was naive. Both understood the political implications of their narrative choices. The question is not which approach is artistically superior but what each approach reveals about the democracy that produced and consumed it.

The supporting characters reinforce each film’s thesis. Avner’s team in Munich includes a toy-maker who assembles bombs and progressively loses his ability to distinguish between his craft and his conscience. Another team member is killed, not by the targets, but by unknown assailants whose identity remains ambiguous, suggesting that the world of covert operations has no clear sides. A third team member begins to question whether the targets on their list are actually the men responsible for Munich, raising the specter that the team may be killing innocents. These internal fractures within the assassination squad mirror the film’s broader argument that revenge corrodes the avenger from within. Dhurandhar’s supporting cast, by contrast, operates as a cohesive unit bound by shared purpose. Internal dissent is minimal. The team’s loyalty to the mission and to each other is presented as a virtue, a reflection of India’s collective resolve. Where Munich’s squad disintegrates, Dhurandhar’s squad solidifies. The comparison with Baby and Phantom shows that this solidification represents an evolution in Bollywood’s depiction of Indian covert operatives, from reluctant agents to willing warriors.

The Reality

Beneath both films lies a shared operational reality: two democracies that authorized their intelligence services to conduct targeted assassinations on foreign soil, accepting the legal, diplomatic, and moral risks that such campaigns entail. Israel’s Operation Wrath of God, launched in late 1972 under authorization from Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, created what became known as Committee X, a small group of senior officials empowered to approve targets for assassination by Mossad’s hit squad, codenamed Bayonet. The complete history of Mossad’s targeted killings reveals a campaign that began with the shooting of Wael Zwaiter in Rome in October 1972 and continued for years, expanding from the original Black September targets to include broader Palestinian leadership. India’s shadow war against Pakistan-based terrorists, the campaign explained in full, follows a structurally parallel trajectory: intelligence operatives identifying targets, conducting surveillance, and executing eliminations in a foreign country whose government provides sanctuary to the targeted individuals.

The operational parallels between the real campaigns that inspired these films are striking in their specificity. Both campaigns relied on human intelligence networks cultivated over years within hostile territory. Mossad’s Wrath of God squads operated across Western Europe, where Palestinian leaders lived relatively openly, using surveillance teams, local informants, and meticulously planned approach-and-escape routes. India’s shadow war operatives, if the pattern of documented killings is to be read as a coordinated campaign, similarly rely on local intelligence, surveillance of target movements, and rapid execution followed by disappearance into the urban fabric of Pakistani cities. Both campaigns targeted individuals who were designated as responsible for specific terrorist attacks but who enjoyed the protection of sovereign governments: Palestinian leaders under the informal protection of various European states and Arab capitals; Pakistani-based terrorists under the formal and informal protection of the Pakistani state and its intelligence apparatus.

Both campaigns also experienced operational setbacks that tested their sustainability. Mossad’s most catastrophic failure during Wrath of God was the 1973 Lillehammer affair, in which agents in Norway mistakenly identified and killed Ahmed Bouchikhi, an innocent Moroccan waiter, believing he was Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September operations chief. The killing of an innocent man, followed by the arrest and conviction of five Mossad agents by Norwegian authorities, exposed the campaign publicly, unraveled Mossad’s European safe-house network, and forced Prime Minister Meir to suspend the assassination program under intense international pressure. The campaign was not reactivated for its final target, Salameh himself, until 1979, when he was killed by a car bomb in Beirut after years of renewed surveillance. India’s shadow war has not produced a publicly documented equivalent of the Lillehammer affair, which may indicate either that the campaign has operated with greater precision or that any failures have been successfully concealed from public view. The absence of a known failure is itself analytically significant: it means that the Indian public has been denied the kind of corrective information that the Lillehammer affair provided to the Israeli public, the concrete demonstration that targeted assassination programs make mistakes, kill innocents, and produce consequences that undermine the moral foundation of the entire enterprise.

The moral complexity spectrum that emerges when placing these two films side by side reveals not a binary between moral and amoral filmmaking but a graduated scale with multiple reference points. At one extreme sits the position that state-sanctioned assassination is always wrong regardless of provocation, a position neither film adopts fully but that Munich approaches asymptotically by its final act. At the other extreme sits the position that state-sanctioned assassination is an unambiguous good when the targets are guilty of terrorism, a position that Dhurandhar does not state explicitly but that its narrative structure endorses implicitly through the consistent absence of moral cost. Between these poles, the spectrum contains several intermediate positions: assassination as tragic necessity (the position Munich’s first act occupies), assassination as duty performed without joy but without regret (the position some of Munich’s team members maintain before cracking), assassination as righteous but corrupting (the position Munich ultimately argues), and assassination as heroic and purifying (the position Dhurandhar’s narrative arc embodies).

Spielberg positions Avner’s moral trajectory as a journey across this spectrum. In the first assassination, Avner occupies the “tragic necessity” position. He kills because he must, and the killing costs him visibly. By the middle of the film, he has moved to “duty without joy,” executing targets with professional detachment while suppressing the emotional toll. By the film’s third act, he has arrived at “righteous but corrupting,” recognizing that the mission has changed him in ways he cannot reverse and questioning whether the change has been worth the operational results. The film’s final scenes suggest he may be approaching the “always wrong” position, though Spielberg is careful never to let Avner articulate this explicitly, preferring to show the psychological wreckage rather than label it philosophically.

Dhurandhar’s protagonist occupies a different section of the spectrum and moves in the opposite direction. He begins the film at “duty performed without regret” and moves steadily toward “heroic and purifying.” Each successful elimination strengthens rather than weakens his conviction. The film provides no scene equivalent to Avner’s conversation with the Palestinian at the safe house. There is no moment where the Dhurandhar protagonist encounters a target’s humanity. The targets exist in the film as functions of their crimes rather than as individuals with histories, families, and grievances of their own. This is a deliberate narrative choice, not an oversight. The filmmakers understood that humanizing the targets would undermine the film’s emotional project, which requires the audience to experience each killing as an uncomplicated victory. The way Indian media subsequently applied the Dhurandhar framework to real killings demonstrates how effectively the film achieved its emotional objective.

The findable artifact in this analysis is the India-Israel revenge cinema moral complexity spectrum positioned through specific scenes from each film. Consider five paired scenes that anchor the spectrum’s key positions. First pair: the authorization scenes. In Munich, Golda Meir authorizes the operation with visible reluctance, telling Avner that every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. She presents the mission as a painful exception to democratic norms. In Dhurandhar, the authorization carries no such reluctance. The intelligence establishment presents the mission as the obvious, overdue response to terrorism, and the protagonist’s eagerness to accept is framed as patriotic virtue rather than troubling zealotry. The authorization scenes establish each film’s moral starting point. Munich begins with acknowledged compromise. Dhurandhar begins with righteous certainty.

Second pair: the first kill. Avner’s first assassination in Munich is deliberately unglamorous. The target is shot in the lobby of his apartment building. He drops his groceries. He bleeds slowly. Avner stands over him, visibly shaken, and the camera holds on the dying man’s face long enough for the audience to see his fear and pain. The scene’s emotional register is dread rather than satisfaction. Dhurandhar’s first major elimination is staged differently: it is fast, precise, and accompanied by a musical score that builds tension and releases it in the moment of execution. The target falls, the protagonist moves, the extraction unfolds. The scene’s emotional register is relief and triumph. These two first kills establish the emotional vocabulary each film will use for every subsequent death.

Third pair: the collateral damage scenes. Munich includes a scene in which Avner’s team kills a target by planting a bomb, but the explosion also threatens an innocent neighbor, a young girl who nearly enters the kill zone. The team scrambles to abort, barely preventing her death. The scene exists to confront the audience with the fundamental problem of targeted assassination: the margin between killing the guilty and killing the innocent is measured in seconds and feet. Dhurandhar includes no equivalent scene. Collateral damage is absent from the film’s world. Every bullet finds its intended target. Every operation unfolds with surgical precision. The absence of collateral damage is not a realistic depiction of covert operations but a narrative choice that removes the strongest argument against them.

Fourth pair: the aftermath scenes. After each assassination in Munich, Spielberg shows Avner processing what he has done. He sits in hotel rooms. He stares at walls. He calls his wife, unable to explain what is wrong. His sleep deteriorates. His paranoia increases. He begins to believe he is being followed, and the film leaves ambiguous whether the surveillance is real or imagined, using the uncertainty to illustrate how covert violence erodes the agent’s grip on reality. Dhurandhar’s aftermath scenes are qualitatively different. After operations, the team debriefs, regroups, and prepares for the next mission. The emotional register is professional satisfaction, camaraderie, and forward momentum. Where Munich shows the psychological cost accumulating between operations, Dhurandhar shows the team’s cohesion strengthening.

Fifth pair: the endings. Munich’s final sequence places Avner in Brooklyn, estranged from Israel, unable to return to normal life, unable to trust his own government, and unable to determine whether the men he killed were actually the men responsible for Munich. His handler offers him return and redemption; Avner refuses both. The camera pulls back to reveal the World Trade Center, connecting the 1972 revenge campaign to the cycle of violence that would produce September 11, 2001. The ending argues that revenge begets revenge, that the cycle has no endpoint, that the men Avner killed have been replaced, and that the killing accomplished nothing permanent. Dhurandhar ends with the protagonist having completed his mission, the terrorists eliminated, and India’s honor restored. The final images carry no ambiguity. The mission was right. The killing was just. The nation is safer. Where Munich’s ending is a question, Dhurandhar’s ending is an answer. Where Munich’s ending undermines the satisfaction its audience might feel, Dhurandhar’s ending delivers and amplifies it.

The five paired scenes above constitute the moral complexity spectrum’s empirical foundation, but the spectrum extends beyond individual scenes into the structural logic of each film’s narrative. Munich’s three-act structure follows a classical tragic arc: the protagonist begins in a position of strength and certainty, encounters forces that progressively undermine both, and arrives at a position of diminished capacity and enlarged understanding. This is the arc of Oedipus, of Hamlet, of every tragic hero who gains wisdom at the cost of everything else he valued. Spielberg consciously embedded Munich within the Western tragic tradition, signaling to his audience that the revenge narrative belongs not to the genre of the action thriller but to the genre of tragedy, where the hero’s greatest achievement is also the instrument of his destruction.

Dhurandhar’s three-act structure follows a heroic arc: the protagonist begins in a position of restraint or limitation, encounters challenges that test and strengthen his capabilities, and arrives at a position of maximized power and vindicated purpose. This is the arc of Odysseus returning to Ithaca, of the warrior who overcomes trials to fulfill his destiny. Bollywood has refined this heroic arc over decades of popular cinema, and Dhurandhar deploys it with practiced precision, signaling to its audience that the revenge narrative belongs to the genre of the action epic, where the hero’s journey is toward fulfillment rather than destruction.

These opposing narrative arcs, tragic versus heroic, are not merely different storytelling choices. They encode different theories of what violence does to the person who commits it. The tragic arc assumes that violence is inherently corrosive: no matter how just the cause, the act of killing another human being diminishes the killer. The heroic arc assumes that violence can be restorative: when the cause is just and the targets are guilty, the act of killing restores something that was taken, whether honor, security, or national dignity. Both theories have adherents in philosophy, psychology, and military ethics. Neither is empirically settled. What the two films demonstrate is that each theory has a natural cinematic form, and that the choice of form predetermines the audience’s emotional experience of the violence depicted.

The intermediary position on the spectrum, occupied by neither Munich nor Dhurandhar but illuminated by their extremes, would be a film that acknowledges both the restorative potential and the corrosive cost of revenge simultaneously. Such a film would show its protagonist gaining something real through violence, genuine security, genuine justice, while also losing something real: innocence, psychological stability, moral certainty. No such film exists in the India-Israel revenge cinema canon, though elements of this intermediary position appear in other national cinemas’ treatments of similar themes.

Pankaj Mishra, writing about how post-colonial democracies process state violence through cultural production, has argued that nations undergoing rapid geopolitical ascent tend to produce cultural artifacts that celebrate rather than interrogate the use of force, because interrogation requires the kind of settled confidence that comes only after the ascent is complete. By this framework, Israel in 2005 had reached a stage of geopolitical maturity that allowed it to produce Munich, a film that questions its own foundational mythology, precisely because the myth was secure enough to withstand questioning. India, still in the acceleration phase of its geopolitical ascent, produced Dhurandhar, a film that reinforces rather than questions the emerging mythology, because the mythology is still being constructed and cannot yet bear the weight of internal critique.

Mark Juergensmeyer’s work on revenge narratives across cultural contexts provides a complementary lens. In his analysis, revenge narratives function differently depending on whether the audience perceives the revenge as completed or ongoing. When the revenge is historical, finished, and its consequences visible, cultural production can afford moral complexity because the audience already knows how the story ends. When the revenge is contemporary and ongoing, moral complexity threatens to undermine public support for operations that are still being conducted. Munich’s audience in 2005 could afford to question Operation Wrath of God because the campaign had ended decades earlier, its successes and failures were documented, and Israel’s security no longer depended on it. Dhurandhar’s audience watches a film about a campaign that continues to produce documented eliminations at an accelerating pace. Moral complexity in Dhurandhar would not merely be an artistic choice; it would be a political intervention in an active intelligence campaign.

This distinction between completed and ongoing revenge is perhaps the single most important variable explaining why Munich interrogates and Dhurandhar celebrates. Spielberg had the luxury of historical distance. Thirty-three years separated the 1972 Munich massacre from the 2005 film. During those decades, Israel fought multiple wars, signed peace accords, watched the Oslo process collapse, and endured the Second Intifada. The passage of time allowed Israelis to evaluate Operation Wrath of God as one episode in a longer, more complicated narrative rather than as an ongoing necessity requiring public solidarity. Dhurandhar operates within a compressed timeframe where the film’s fictional events and the real shadow war’s documented operations overlap almost completely. The audience watching the film knows that the operations it depicts are not historical but present-tense. Asking that audience to question the morality of those operations while they are still being conducted, and while the threat that provoked them remains active, would be a fundamentally different artistic act than what Spielberg attempted.

Where Film and Reality Converge

Despite their opposite emotional architectures, Munich and Dhurandhar converge on several crucial points that illuminate the shared logic of democratic revenge cinema. Both films accept the same foundational premise: that terrorism committed against a nation’s citizens creates a legitimate claim to retaliatory violence beyond that nation’s borders. Neither film seriously entertains the pacifist position that assassination is always wrong. Munich’s Avner never concludes that Israel should not have responded; his crisis is about the method and the cost, not the principle. Dhurandhar never even raises the question of whether the covert campaign should exist. Both films take the existence of the assassination program as given and proceed to argue about what it does to the people who carry it out and the nations that authorize it. This shared premise reflects a consensus position in both democracies: that a government which allows its citizens to be killed with impunity forfeits its claim to legitimacy, and that covert action is a permissible tool when overt diplomacy and conventional military force have failed.

Both films also converge on the question of state deniability. In Munich, the Israeli government maintains plausible deniability by creating an “off-the-books” team with no official connection to Mossad. Avner resigns from the service before beginning the mission. His expenses are reimbursed through untraceable accounts. If the team is captured or killed, Israel will deny involvement. In Dhurandhar, a similar architecture of deniability exists. The protagonist works through cutouts and cover identities. The government maintains the fiction that no such campaign is being conducted. This convergence reflects a structural reality of targeted assassination programs: democratic governments cannot publicly acknowledge them without creating diplomatic crises, legal liabilities, and domestic political complications. Both films dramatize this tension between what the state does and what it admits to doing, though they process the tension differently. Munich treats deniability as evidence of moral compromise: if the killing were truly righteous, the government would claim it openly. Dhurandhar treats deniability as operational necessity: the killing is righteous, and the deniability exists to protect the operatives and preserve diplomatic space, not because the state is ashamed.

The films converge most powerfully on the relationship between the individual agent and the institutional apparatus that deploys him. Both Avner and Dhurandhar’s protagonist are presented as instruments of state policy who must carry the personal burden of actions their governments will neither acknowledge nor honor publicly. Both characters operate in a space where personal morality and institutional imperative collide. In Munich, the collision produces fracture; in Dhurandhar, it produces fusion. But both films acknowledge that the collision exists, that the agent is not simply a tool but a human being whose inner life is shaped by what the state asks him to do. This is the shared humanist core of both films, despite their opposite conclusions about what that shaping produces.

Both India and Israel, this comparison reveals, have chosen to process their experiences of terrorism through the genre of the revenge thriller rather than through the documentary, the legal drama, or the political satire. This genre choice is itself significant. The revenge thriller places a single protagonist at the center of events, personalizing what is in reality an institutional undertaking. It converts the collective action of an intelligence agency into the individual journey of one person, allowing the audience to experience the state’s covert campaign through the lens of personal heroism, personal sacrifice, and personal moral reckoning. Both Munich and Dhurandhar use this personalization strategy, but they use it to different ends. Munich personalizes the campaign to make its costs visible: one man’s psychological disintegration stands for the moral price paid by the society that authorized his mission. Dhurandhar personalizes the campaign to make its heroism visible: one man’s competence and courage stand for the national resolve that the campaign represents.

The genre choice also constrains what each film can say about institutional responsibility. By centering a single protagonist, both films necessarily simplify the decision-making architecture behind targeted assassination programs. Real assassination campaigns involve committees, review processes, legal opinions, risk assessments, and chains of command that diffuse moral responsibility across dozens or hundreds of individuals. Neither film can depict this diffusion without sacrificing narrative momentum. Munich approximates the institutional dimension through Avner’s handlers and Golda Meir’s authorization scene, but the emotional weight of the film rests on Avner’s individual moral journey. Dhurandhar similarly centers the protagonist’s experience while leaving the institutional apparatus as background. Both films, by genre necessity, make assassination feel like a personal act rather than a bureaucratic process. This personalization serves different purposes in each film: in Munich, it makes the moral cost visceral because it is borne by a single recognizable person; in Dhurandhar, it makes the heroism tangible because it is embodied in a single charismatic performer.

Both films also converge in their treatment of the intelligence handler, the senior official who authorizes and manages the assassination campaign from behind a desk. In Munich, Geoffrey Rush plays Ephraim, Avner’s case officer, as a man who is emotionally detached from the killings he orders, viewing them as strategic moves on a geopolitical chessboard. Ephraim’s detachment contrasts with Avner’s increasing emotional entanglement, and the contrast argues that the system creates two kinds of damage: it destroys the agent who does the killing and it dehumanizes the handler who orders it. Dhurandhar’s handler figure operates from a different register. The handler is presented as a patriotic elder whose wisdom and conviction provide moral cover for the protagonist’s actions. The handler’s authority derives not from bureaucratic position but from moral stature, from a lifetime of service that has earned the right to send men to kill. Where Munich’s handler is a symptom of institutional cold-bloodedness, Dhurandhar’s handler is a source of institutional righteousness.

The broader evolution from victim narrative to aggressor narrative in Bollywood’s treatment of terrorism provides essential context for understanding why Dhurandhar’s narrative structure differs so fundamentally from Munich’s. For decades, Indian cinema depicted the nation as a victim of terrorism: Hotel Mumbai, A Wednesday, Black Friday. These films focused on the suffering of civilians, the incompetence of the state response, and the trauma of survival. Dhurandhar represents the moment when Indian cinema flipped the script, producing not a film about enduring terrorism but a film about responding to it with lethal force. This flip had no parallel in Israeli cinema because Israel’s cultural production never went through an equivalent victim phase. From its founding, Israeli cinema included narratives of military action and intelligence operations. Israeli audiences did not need to be introduced to the concept of state violence the way Indian audiences did, because state violence had been part of Israel’s national story from 1948 onward. Munich could question state violence precisely because its existence was already established and accepted. Dhurandhar could not question state violence because it was still in the process of establishing and normalizing it.

This normalization function is where the two films’ social roles diverge most sharply. Munich was released into an Israeli culture that had debated targeted assassinations for decades. The practice was not new, not secret (in the meaningful sense), and not particularly controversial in its basic existence. What remained controversial was its scope, its effectiveness, and its moral implications. Munich intervened in that existing debate by arguing for the “corrupting” position on the moral complexity spectrum. Dhurandhar was released into an Indian culture that was only beginning to acknowledge that its government might conduct covert assassinations abroad. The practice was new (or newly visible), still officially denied, and profoundly controversial in its basic existence. Dhurandhar intervened not in an existing debate but in the creation of a new consensus, arguing that covert assassination is not only permissible but heroic. The comparison between India and Israel’s operational doctrines shows that India’s covert campaign began decades after Israel’s, and the cultural processing of that campaign through cinema is correspondingly decades behind.

The normalization process itself operates through different mechanisms in each film. Munich normalizes moral complexity about state violence by embedding it within a prestige-cinema framework: the film’s awards, its director’s reputation, and its production values all signal to the audience that questioning state violence is a respectable intellectual position. The film gives permission to doubt by wrapping doubt in cinematic prestige. Dhurandhar normalizes the existence of state violence by embedding it within a popular-entertainment framework: the film’s star power, its action set pieces, and its commercial appeal all signal to the audience that embracing state violence is a mainstream position. The film gives permission to celebrate by wrapping celebration in cinematic pleasure. Both normalization mechanisms are effective because they operate through genre expectations rather than explicit argument. Neither film lectures its audience. Both films seduce, using the emotional tools of cinema to make their respective positions feel natural, inevitable, and beyond reasonable objection.

Gender dynamics in each film add another layer to the convergence-divergence analysis. Munich gives significant screen time to Avner’s wife, whose presence in the narrative functions as a tether to civilian life and civilian morality. Her character embodies the domestic world that Avner is progressively losing access to, and her emotional responses to his increasing withdrawal serve as a barometer for the audience, measuring damage that Avner himself cannot acknowledge. Avner’s sexual relationship with his wife deteriorates as the mission continues, culminating in a deeply unsettling scene in which his lovemaking is intercut with memories of the Munich massacre, suggesting that the violence has infiltrated even his most intimate spaces. Spielberg uses the domestic sphere as a measure of psychological damage: as Avner’s capacity for intimacy erodes, the audience understands that the mission has destroyed not just his professional composure but his fundamental humanity. Dhurandhar’s treatment of romantic and domestic relationships operates differently. The protagonist’s personal life, while present, does not function as a damage indicator. Romantic moments provide emotional texture and motivation rather than serving as measures of psychological erosion. The protagonist’s ability to maintain personal relationships alongside his operational duties is presented as evidence of his resilience and wholeness, not as a symptom of compartmentalization.

The question of whether Dhurandhar’s lack of moral complexity represents a failure of artistic courage or an accurate reflection of India’s current political moment is the central disagreement that this comparison must adjudicate. The argument that Dhurandhar fails as art because it refuses to interrogate its own premise rests on the assumption that moral interrogation is an inherent requirement of serious filmmaking. By this standard, any revenge thriller that celebrates its own violence without questioning it is artistically deficient, regardless of context. The argument that Dhurandhar succeeds as cultural production precisely because it provides the emotional architecture its audience needs rests on a different assumption: that art serves different functions at different historical moments, and that a young democracy experiencing its first sustained covert campaign requires narrative validation before it can afford narrative interrogation.

Adjudicating this disagreement requires acknowledging that both arguments contain truth, and that the tension between them cannot be resolved through appeal to a single critical standard. Dhurandhar does lack the moral complexity that Munich demonstrates is possible within the revenge-thriller genre. That absence is a limitation regardless of context. At the same time, Dhurandhar does serve a genuine cultural function by providing India with a narrative vocabulary for an experience that previously existed only in official denials and fragmentary news reports. A film that had attempted Munich-level moral complexity about India’s shadow war would have required either insider information that does not exist in the public domain or imaginative speculation that would have been attacked as irresponsible fabrication. Dhurandhar’s filmmakers, working within the constraints of available information and commercial incentive, produced the film that their moment permitted. Whether their moment should have permitted more is a question that hinges on what one believes a filmmaker’s obligations are in a democracy conducting covert violence: to validate what the state is doing, to question it, or to document it without judgment. Munich chose the questioning path. Dhurandhar chose the validating path. A future Indian film may choose the documenting path, and that choice will require both more information than currently exists and more cultural distance than currently separates India from its shadow war.

The commercial dynamics of each film’s production environment deserve examination because they shape the range of moral positions a filmmaker can commercially sustain. Munich was produced by Steven Spielberg through DreamWorks and Universal, with a production budget of approximately seventy million dollars. Spielberg’s personal brand was strong enough to guarantee distribution regardless of the film’s political content, and his stature within the industry insulated him from the kind of commercial pressure that might have pushed the film toward a more celebratory register. A less established filmmaker attempting the same moral complexity would have faced greater resistance from studios and distributors concerned about audience alienation. Dhurandhar was produced within Bollywood’s commercial ecosystem, where opening-weekend performance drives profitability and where patriotic action films have demonstrated reliable audience appeal since Uri: The Surgical Strike established the template. A Bollywood filmmaker who proposed a morally complex treatment of India’s shadow war would have faced legitimate questions from producers about whether complexity would reduce the audience or expand it, and the available evidence (Uri’s enormous success, Dhurandhar’s comparable success) suggested that celebration was the commercially optimal strategy.

Where Film and Reality Diverge

Perhaps the most revealing divergence between Munich and Dhurandhar lies not in their respective moral architectures but in how each film’s home audience received the moral architecture it was offered. Munich opened to polarized reviews in Israel. Some Israeli critics praised Spielberg for having the courage to question a sacred national narrative. Others attacked him for equating Israeli self-defense with Palestinian terrorism. The political establishment was divided. Former Mossad operatives who had participated in Operation Wrath of God offered varied assessments, with some praising the film’s accuracy and others condemning its emotional register as defeatist. The Israeli audience response confirmed that the film had successfully intervened in an existing debate: it did not create consensus but intensified disagreement, which is precisely what interrogative art is designed to do.

Dhurandhar’s reception in India was qualitatively different. The film opened to massive commercial success and overwhelming audience enthusiasm. Critical dissent existed but was marginal. The dominant response was cathartic: audiences cheered during elimination sequences, packed theaters for repeat viewings, and generated social media content that celebrated the film as a statement of national capability. Political leaders praised the film publicly. The film’s box office performance confirmed that the audience wanted exactly what the film offered: validation, not interrogation. This reception pattern suggests that Dhurandhar read its cultural moment correctly. The Indian public did not want to be challenged by a revenge thriller; it wanted to be affirmed. Whether this desire for affirmation is healthy for a democracy is a separate question from whether the film correctly identified and served it.

The divergence in reception illuminates a deeper structural difference between the two democracies’ relationships with state violence. Israel, by 2005, had conducted targeted assassinations openly enough and for long enough that the practice had become a subject of domestic legal challenge, parliamentary inquiry, and sustained media investigation. The Israeli Supreme Court had heard cases on the legality of targeted killings. Israeli journalists had published investigative accounts of specific operations. The relationship between the Israeli state and targeted assassination was, by 2005, a matter of public record and ongoing legal-political contestation. Munich entered this ecosystem as one more contribution to a conversation that was already decades old.

India’s relationship with covert assassination is at a fundamentally different stage. The government has never officially acknowledged the existence of a targeted killing program. Parliamentary debate on the subject has been minimal. Media coverage, while increasing, treats the topic with a degree of caution born from the absence of official confirmation. The conversation that Munich joined in Israel barely existed in India when Dhurandhar arrived. Dhurandhar did not join a conversation; it started one, and it started it in terms that favored the practice by wrapping it in heroic narrative before critical examination could establish itself.

The audience’s relationship with the protagonist provides another point of divergence. Israeli audiences in 2005 had a sophisticated understanding of what Mossad operatives actually do, how they live, what kind of people they are. Decades of journalistic investigation, published memoirs by former intelligence officers, and previous films had given Israeli culture a detailed, nuanced picture of the intelligence operative as a real person with a real psychological profile. Munich’s Avner was received against this backdrop of existing knowledge: audiences could evaluate Spielberg’s portrayal against what they already knew about the reality. Indian audiences had no comparable reference point. India’s intelligence services are among the most opaque in any democracy. RAW has published no memoirs comparable to those of Mossad veterans. Investigative journalism on RAW’s operations is sparse. The Indian public’s understanding of what a covert operative looks like, thinks like, and feels like has been shaped almost entirely by cinema. Dhurandhar’s protagonist was received not as one interpretation of a known reality but as the introduction to an unknown one. For many Indian viewers, the Dhurandhar operative is the definitive representation of what Indian intelligence operatives are, because no competing representation exists in the public discourse.

This representational monopoly gives Dhurandhar a power that Munich never had. Spielberg’s film competed with existing narratives about Mossad and could be judged against them. If Spielberg got the emotional register wrong, his audience had other sources to correct the impression. Dhurandhar operates in an information vacuum where the film’s representation is the representation. When Indian media subsequently began describing real targeted killings as “Dhurandhar-style,” they were not comparing reality to one of many available frameworks; they were importing the only framework available. The film did not reflect how India understood the shadow war; it created the framework through which India would understand it. This creative power is the most significant difference between the two films’ cultural functions, and it is a power that neither the filmmakers nor their audience may fully appreciate.

The representational monopoly extends beyond the shadow war itself into broader questions of how India imagines its intelligence services. Israel’s public culture includes multiple competing images of Mossad: the heroic agency of Entebbe rescue narratives, the fallible bureaucracy of Lillehammer accounts, the morally gray institution of Ronen Bergman’s investigative journalism, and the humanized individuals of former officers’ memoirs. These competing images create a composite picture that is complex, contradictory, and therefore closer to reality than any single representation could achieve. India’s public culture includes almost no comparable competing images of RAW. Before Dhurandhar, popular understanding of RAW came primarily from speculative journalism and earlier Bollywood depictions that were either generic spy adventures or thinly veiled fantasies. Dhurandhar did not enter a marketplace of competing images; it effectively created the marketplace and established itself as its dominant product.

Consequences of this representational monopoly for democratic accountability are significant and deserve careful, sustained analytical attention. In Israel, the multiplicity of Mossad representations meant that public debate about intelligence operations could draw on diverse frames of reference. Politicians, journalists, and citizens could reference different narratives when arguing about whether a particular operation was justified, effective, or ethically acceptable. In India, the near-monopoly of Dhurandhar as the dominant representation of the shadow war means that public debate about India’s covert campaign is conducted largely through the film’s framework: every killing is “Dhurandhar-style,” every success is heroic, and the vocabulary of critique barely exists in the public discourse. A democracy’s capacity for self-correction depends on its citizens having access to multiple narratives about state action. When a single narrative dominates, the capacity for self-correction is diminished even if the dominant narrative is broadly accurate.

The critical responses to the two films further illustrate the divergence. Munich’s most prominent critics engaged with its moral argument on philosophical grounds. Did Spielberg create a false equivalence between Israeli security and Palestinian grievance? Was the film’s moral complexity a form of cowardice that refused to condemn terrorism unambiguously? These debates treated the film as a contribution to moral philosophy, evaluating its arguments on their merits. Dhurandhar’s most prominent critics engaged with its political function rather than its moral argument. Was the film state propaganda? Did it normalize extrajudicial killing? Was its timing (during an active campaign) evidence of government involvement in its production? These debates treated the film as a political act rather than an artistic statement, evaluating its social effects rather than its philosophical content. The difference in critical register reveals a difference in cultural expectation: Israeli culture expected a revenge film to have a moral argument and evaluated it accordingly; Indian culture expected a revenge film to have a political function and evaluated it accordingly.

Critical register divergence extends further and more revealingly when examining how each film’s home country classified it within its national cinema tradition. Munich was received in Israel as part of a long tradition of self-critical Israeli filmmaking that includes Waltz with Bashir, Lebanon, and Beaufort, films that interrogate the costs of military action and question the narratives their society tells itself about violence. Munich’s placement within this tradition gave Israeli audiences a critical framework for evaluating it: they understood what Spielberg was doing because other Israeli filmmakers had done something similar, albeit with different subjects and different cinematic approaches. Dhurandhar was received in India as part of a newer tradition of patriotic action cinema that includes Uri: The Surgical Strike, Baby, and Phantom. Its placement within this tradition gave Indian audiences a different critical framework: they understood what Dhurandhar was doing because the genre had established conventions of heroic sacrifice and national vindication. Both audiences responded to the films through genre expectations shaped by prior national cinema, and those expectations determined which questions each audience thought to ask.

The domestic political contexts of each film’s release further explain the divergent receptions. Munich was released in late December 2005, during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, a politically traumatic moment when Israeli society was deeply divided about the future of the occupation and the utility of military force. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and its prestige-cinema credentials gave it cultural authority that amplified its questioning voice within Israeli public discourse. The film’s questioning of retaliatory violence resonated with a society already questioning its own security policies. Spielberg may not have intended Munich as a commentary on the disengagement, but the political moment ensured that audiences would receive it as one. Dhurandhar was released during a period of rising nationalist sentiment in India, when public frustration with Pakistan-based terrorism had reached a peak following multiple cross-border attacks and when political leaders were explicitly endorsing a more aggressive counter-terrorism posture. The film’s celebration of covert violence resonated with a society that had been told by its leaders that restraint was over and that the time for action had arrived. Both films were amplified by their political contexts: Munich’s questioning voice was amplified by a questioning moment; Dhurandhar’s celebratory voice was amplified by a celebratory moment.

Spielberg’s decision to end Munich with the World Trade Center in the background was a deliberate statement that linked the 1972 revenge campaign to the broader arc of terrorism and counter-terrorism that culminated in September 11, 2001. The implication was clear: revenge does not end the cycle; it extends it. Avner’s killings did not prevent future attacks; they contributed to the escalation that produced them. This is a claim about the futility of retaliatory violence, and it is the most controversial claim Munich makes. No equivalent claim appears in Dhurandhar. The film does not suggest that India’s covert campaign will produce blowback, escalation, or unintended consequences. The campaign is presented as effective and terminal: the terrorists are eliminated, the threat is reduced, and the nation is safer. Whether this is a more or less accurate representation of reality depends on one’s assessment of the ongoing shadow war, but it is unquestionably a more comforting one.

What the Comparison Reveals

Temporal distance is the variable that best explains the difference between Munich and Dhurandhar without reducing the explanation to national character or artistic courage. Spielberg made Munich thirty-three years after the events it depicts. During those three decades, the moral landscape around Operation Wrath of God had shifted dramatically. The 1973 Lillehammer affair, in which Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter they misidentified as Ali Hassan Salameh, had become a well-documented embarrassment that illustrated the operational and moral risks of targeted assassination. Former team members had published accounts expressing regret, ambivalence, and psychological damage. The passage of time had allowed the costs of the operation to become visible alongside its achievements, and Spielberg could portray both because his audience already knew about both.

The temporal variable operates through multiple mechanisms, each of which deserves separate examination. First, temporal distance permits the declassification and publication of operational details that would be too sensitive to reveal during an active campaign. Israel’s intelligence community, while still guarding many secrets, had by 2005 allowed enough operational information into the public domain through authorized leaks, memoir publication, and journalistic investigation that a filmmaker could construct a plausible operational narrative without relying entirely on imagination. Spielberg worked with the George Jonas book Vengeance, which itself drew on the claimed testimony of a team member. Whether that testimony was entirely accurate remains debated, but its existence in the public domain gave the film a factual anchor that the filmmaker could interrogate, extend, and dramatize. No comparable factual anchor exists in the public domain for India’s shadow war. The filmmakers behind Dhurandhar worked with publicly available reporting about the targeted killings and with the general knowledge that India possessed the motivation and capability to conduct such operations, but they could not draw on insider testimony, because no insider has spoken, or on declassified operational details, because no details have been declassified.

Second, temporal distance permits the formation of critical consensus about an operation’s costs and benefits. By 2005, the academic and journalistic consensus on Operation Wrath of God included several conclusions that would have been impossible to reach during the campaign itself: that some targets were incorrectly identified, that the campaign’s disruption of Palestinian organizations was temporary rather than permanent, that the Lillehammer disaster damaged Israel’s international standing, and that the psychological toll on team members was substantial. These conclusions gave Spielberg a critical framework within which to construct his moral argument. No comparable critical consensus exists about India’s shadow war because the campaign is too recent and too secretive for sustained academic and journalistic evaluation.

Third, temporal distance permits the audience to evaluate a completed narrative rather than an ongoing one. Israeli audiences watching Munich in 2005 knew how Operation Wrath of God ended: some targets were killed, others were not; Salameh was eventually assassinated in 1979 after the Lillehammer detour; the campaign’s strategic impact was debatable; and Israel’s security challenges continued regardless. This knowledge of the ending allowed audiences to evaluate the campaign holistically rather than investing emotional energy in its success. Indian audiences watching Dhurandhar do not know how the shadow war will end, and this uncertainty produces a fundamentally different emotional orientation: rather than evaluating a completed story, they are participating in an ongoing one, and the film’s celebratory register aligns with their desire for the campaign to succeed.

Dhurandhar was made during the events it depicts. The shadow war it dramatizes was (and remains) an active campaign whose full consequences are not yet known. No equivalent of the Lillehammer affair has occurred publicly. No team members have published memoirs. The operational costs, if they exist, have not yet surfaced in the public record. Dhurandhar’s filmmakers could not portray costs that have not yet manifested, and their audience could not evaluate a campaign whose full trajectory is still unfolding. The temporal proximity between the film and its subject matter does not merely constrain the filmmaker’s artistic choices; it constrains the audience’s capacity for critical reception. Audiences processing a completed historical event can afford moral complexity because the stakes of that complexity are archival. Audiences processing an ongoing event cannot afford moral complexity because the stakes are present-tense and operational.

This temporal argument does not absolve Dhurandhar of the charge that it avoids moral complexity. It contextualizes that avoidance as historically conditioned rather than artistically deficient. If India’s shadow war continues for another decade and its costs become visible, a future Indian filmmaker may produce the equivalent of Munich: a film that looks back at the early campaign with the benefit of hindsight and asks whether the killing was worth what it cost. That film would not be possible without the temporal distance that allows costs to become visible and the cultural maturity that allows a nation to examine its own violent past without feeling that the examination undermines its present security. The broader trajectory of how Bollywood has evolved from depicting India as a terror victim to celebrating its response suggests that India is still in the phase of establishing the narrative of agency and has not yet reached the phase where that narrative can be safely interrogated.

The question of whether India will eventually produce its own Munich is not merely a question about filmmaking but about national maturity. Israel’s journey from Operation Wrath of God in 1972 to Munich in 2005 required thirty-three years, multiple wars, failed peace processes, domestic political upheaval, and the gradual democratization of intelligence information through memoirs, journalism, and declassification. India’s journey toward its own Munich would require similar conditions: the passage of time, the publication of insider accounts, the surfacing of operational costs, and the development of a cultural consensus strong enough to withstand self-examination. None of these conditions currently exist. India’s intelligence establishment remains opaque. The shadow war’s costs, if any, are invisible to the public. The cultural consensus around the campaign is still forming and has not yet solidified enough to bear the weight of critical examination. Dhurandhar is the film this moment demands. Munich is the film a future moment may permit.

Institutional prerequisites for an Indian Munich deserve enumeration because they illuminate the gap between where India’s cultural processing of state violence stands and where it would need to reach. Israel by 2005 had produced multiple memoirs by former intelligence officers, including accounts that contradicted official narratives and revealed operational failures. India has produced no comparable memoirs from RAW officers involved in the current campaign. Israel by 2005 had experienced multiple journalistic investigations that named specific operations, identified specific agents, and documented specific consequences, including the Lillehammer killing of an innocent man. India’s journalistic investigation of the shadow war, while growing, has not yet produced a comparable body of documented operational detail. Israel by 2005 had seen its Supreme Court hear arguments about the legality of targeted killings and issue rulings that constrained (if imperfectly) the executive’s discretion. India’s judiciary has not addressed the question of extrajudicial killings abroad in any comparable manner. Each of these institutional developments was a prerequisite for Munich’s emotional register: Spielberg could make a film that questioned targeted assassination because the questioning had already been modeled by other institutions, journalism, memoir, judiciary, and the film’s interrogative posture was therefore culturally legible rather than shocking.

The intermediary step between Dhurandhar and a hypothetical Indian Munich might be a film that celebrates the shadow war while acknowledging specific costs: a successful mission that kills the right target but damages an innocent bystander, a loyal operative who completes the mission but suffers visible psychological consequences, a handler who authorizes a kill only to discover that the intelligence was incomplete. Such a film would maintain the basic patriotic framework that Indian audiences currently expect while introducing gradations of moral complexity within that framework. This intermediary form already exists in American cinema: films like American Sniper celebrate military heroism while acknowledging the psychological toll of combat, occupying a middle ground between Munich’s interrogation and Dhurandhar’s celebration. Whether Indian cinema develops a comparable intermediary form or leaps directly from celebration to interrogation remains to be seen.

Both films ultimately reveal that revenge cinema serves a social function beyond entertainment. Munich served as a vehicle for Israel to process the psychological damage of decades of covert violence. By dramatizing Avner’s disintegration, Spielberg gave Israeli audiences a narrative framework for discussing the personal and institutional costs of targeted assassination. The film did not end the debate, but it gave the debate new emotional vocabulary. Dhurandhar serves a different but equally important social function: it provides India with a narrative framework for accepting and validating the existence of a covert campaign that was previously unspeakable. Before Dhurandhar, India had no cultural language for its shadow war. After Dhurandhar, the phrase “Dhurandhar-style” entered the national vocabulary as a way of describing and celebrating real targeted killings. The film gave India permission to acknowledge what its government will not officially confirm.

This permission-granting function is perhaps the most important similarity between the two films, despite their opposite emotional registers. Munich gave Israel permission to question its revenge campaign. Dhurandhar gave India permission to celebrate its revenge campaign. Both permissions were needed by their respective societies at their respective historical moments. Israel in 2005 needed permission to question because questioning had been suppressed by a political culture that treated any criticism of security operations as disloyalty. India needed permission to celebrate because celebration had been suppressed by a political culture that treated covert operations as unseemly and un-democratic. Both films liberated something in their audiences: Munich liberated doubt; Dhurandhar liberated pride.

The comparative analysis should not, however, suggest that Dhurandhar’s absence of moral complexity is entirely a product of temporal proximity and cultural stage. Artistic choice is irreducible to context. Spielberg chose to make Munich morally complex because he is an artist committed to moral inquiry, not merely because the historical moment permitted it. Israeli cinema includes plenty of jingoistic revenge fantasies that do not question their own premises; Munich is exceptional within its own tradition, not representative of it. Similarly, Indian cinema includes films capable of moral complexity on sensitive subjects. The question of why Dhurandhar’s specific filmmakers chose celebration over interrogation cannot be answered entirely by reference to the cultural moment; individual artistic vision and commercial calculation also played roles. Commercial incentives in India’s film market strongly favor patriotic narratives, and a morally complex revenge film would have been a commercial risk that no major Bollywood production house had reason to take.

Extending this analysis to a third national cinema, the comparison with Zero Dark Thirty extends this analysis to a third national cinema and reveals that the United States occupies an intermediate position on the moral complexity spectrum. Kathryn Bigelow’s film acknowledges the moral costs of the bin Laden hunt (most notably through its unflinching depiction of torture) while ultimately endorsing the mission’s outcome. Zero Dark Thirty neither celebrates with Dhurandhar’s abandon nor interrogates with Munich’s rigor; it records with clinical precision and leaves the moral evaluation to the audience. Three democracies, three covert campaigns, three films, three positions on the spectrum. The variation reveals that there is no single way a democracy processes state violence through cinema. The processing depends on temporal distance, cultural stage, artistic vision, commercial incentive, and the specific relationship between the nation and the violence it has authorized.

The three-film comparison also reveals a pattern in how each democracy sequences its cultural processing. Israel produced celebratory narratives first (early Mossad-glorifying films and television series in the 1960s and 1970s), then transitional narratives that acknowledged costs while maintaining heroic frameworks (various Israeli television productions in the 1990s), and finally interrogative narratives (Munich in 2005, plus a wave of self-critical Israeli cinema that peaked in the late 2000s). The United States followed a compressed version of the same sequence after September 11: initial celebratory narratives (early war-on-terror films), transitional narratives that acknowledged torture and civilian casualties (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), and the beginnings of interrogative narratives (later films questioning the entire war-on-terror framework). India appears to be at the beginning of this sequence, with Dhurandhar occupying the celebratory phase. If the pattern holds, transitional and interrogative narratives will follow, but on a timeline determined by the specific conditions of India’s democratic culture, institutional transparency, and the shadow war’s duration.

What Munich and Dhurandhar share most profoundly is not their subject matter but their honesty about what their audiences want. Spielberg understood that Israeli audiences in 2005 were ready for doubt and gave them doubt. Dhurandhar’s filmmakers understood that Indian audiences were ready for pride and gave them pride. Both films succeed as cultural interventions because they correctly read their moments. Neither film lies to its audience; both tell the truth their audience is prepared to hear. The question is not which truth is more complete but whether the truth that Dhurandhar tells, the truth of righteous revenge, can eventually accommodate the truth that Munich tells, the truth that righteousness erodes under the weight of its own violence. That accommodation, when it arrives, will be the surest sign that India’s relationship with its shadow war has matured beyond the need for narrative protection and reached the point where narrative interrogation becomes not a threat to national security but a contribution to national wisdom.

The final analytical observation concerns the relationship between these two films and the real campaigns they depict. Both films have influenced how their nations understand and evaluate the covert operations they dramatize. Munich changed how many Israelis thought about Operation Wrath of God: before the film, the campaign was primarily understood as a successful revenge mission; after the film, the campaign’s psychological costs and operational ambiguities became part of the public narrative. Dhurandhar is changing how Indians think about the shadow war: before the film, the campaign was primarily understood through sparse media reports and government denials; after the film, the campaign is understood through a heroic narrative framework that celebrates precision, patriotism, and national capability. In both cases, the film did not merely reflect public understanding; it actively shaped it. Cinema, when it engages with covert operations, becomes itself a form of intelligence work: it shapes the narrative environment in which real operations are evaluated, funded, supported, or questioned. Munich performed this narrative work in service of questioning. Dhurandhar performs it in service of celebration. The audience for each film becomes, in a sense, an asset recruited to view the world through a particular analytical lens.

Whether future scholars will look back at Dhurandhar as the beginning of a tradition of interrogative Indian security cinema or as a standalone cultural event depends on whether India’s shadow war produces the kinds of documented costs, institutional debates, and insider accounts that gave Spielberg the material for Munich. If those costs remain invisible, either because they do not exist or because the Indian state successfully suppresses their visibility, then Dhurandhar’s celebratory framework may remain the dominant lens for understanding India’s covert campaign. If those costs surface, as they did for Israel over three decades, then a future Indian filmmaker may find in them the raw material for an Indian Munich, and the comparison analyzed in this article will shift from a study of two films to a study of two phases in a single democratic process of reckoning with the consequences of state violence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Spielberg’s Munich?

Both films depict democratic nations conducting targeted assassinations abroad in response to terrorism, but they process the moral implications in opposite directions. Munich follows a Mossad operative whose moral confidence erodes with each killing until he is psychologically shattered and unable to continue. Dhurandhar follows a RAW operative whose confidence strengthens with each successful elimination, ending the film as a vindicated hero. Munich asks whether revenge destroys the avenger; Dhurandhar presents revenge as an act of national restoration. The difference reflects not merely different artistic sensibilities but different stages of national development: Israel in 2005 had processed three decades of covert operations and could afford self-interrogation, while India’s shadow war remains active and its cultural processing is still in the validation phase rather than the examination phase.

Q: Why does Munich question revenge while Dhurandhar celebrates it?

The primary explanation is temporal distance. Spielberg made Munich thirty-three years after Operation Wrath of God, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, published memoirs, the Lillehammer affair, and a cultural consensus stable enough to withstand self-examination. Dhurandhar was made during an active campaign whose costs have not yet surfaced publicly. Audiences processing completed historical events can tolerate moral complexity because the stakes are archival; audiences processing ongoing operations need narrative solidarity because the stakes are present-tense. Additionally, Israel’s intelligence culture had been partially democratized through declassification and memoir publication by 2005, while India’s intelligence establishment remains opaque, giving Dhurandhar’s filmmakers neither the information nor the cultural permission to portray moral ambiguity.

Q: Is Dhurandhar as artistically accomplished as Munich?

These are two different kinds of filmmaking serving two different cultural functions, and comparing their artistic merit requires acknowledging those differences. Munich is a character study embedded in a political thriller, prioritizing psychological depth and moral inquiry over action spectacle. Dhurandhar is an action thriller embedded in a patriotic narrative, prioritizing kinetic energy and emotional catharsis over psychological exploration. Munich is the more complex film by conventional critical standards that prize ambiguity and interrogation. Dhurandhar is the more effective film by standards that measure how precisely a film delivers the emotional experience its audience seeks. Both are technically accomplished productions by major filmmakers with clear artistic visions.

Q: What does the comparison reveal about India and Israel?

The comparison reveals that both democracies have authorized covert assassination campaigns in response to terrorism but process the moral implications of those campaigns at different speeds determined by institutional transparency, temporal distance, and cultural readiness for self-examination. Israel has had decades to develop a public vocabulary for discussing the costs and benefits of targeted killings, including legal challenges, parliamentary debates, and investigative journalism. India is still in the early stages of developing that vocabulary, relying on cinema rather than institutional mechanisms to process the existence of its shadow war.

Q: Are India and Israel at different stages of processing state violence?

Substantially, yes. Israel began conducting targeted assassinations in the early 1950s and has had over seven decades to develop the institutional, legal, and cultural infrastructure for processing what those campaigns mean. India’s documented shadow war is far more recent, and the institutional infrastructure for processing it barely exists. India has not had the equivalent of the Lillehammer affair, published operative memoirs, Supreme Court cases on targeted killing, or sustained parliamentary debate. Until those institutional processing mechanisms develop, India’s primary processing tool remains popular cinema, which naturally favors validation over interrogation.

Q: Did Indian audiences reject moral complexity?

The evidence suggests that Indian audiences were not offered moral complexity and therefore did not have the opportunity to accept or reject it. Dhurandhar’s commercial success does not prove that a morally complex Indian revenge film would fail; it proves that a morally uncomplicated one succeeded. No major Bollywood production has attempted the experiment of presenting India’s shadow war with Munich-level ambiguity, so the audience’s appetite for complexity remains untested. The commercial incentive structure of the Indian film market strongly favors patriotic narratives, and producers have had no financial reason to test whether complexity would attract comparable audiences.

Q: How do the protagonists of Munich and Dhurandhar differ morally?

Avner in Munich begins as a patriot who believes in his mission and ends as a traumatized exile who has lost faith in the purpose and morality of what he did. His moral arc is one of disintegration. Dhurandhar’s protagonist begins as a patriot who believes in his mission and ends as a validated hero whose faith has been confirmed by operational success. His moral arc is one of crystallization. Avner’s journey argues that killing corrodes the killer regardless of the target’s guilt. Dhurandhar’s protagonist argues that killing guilty men is a form of duty that strengthens rather than corrupts.

Q: Will India eventually produce its own Munich?

Possibly, but not until several preconditions are met: sufficient temporal distance from the current campaign, the publication of insider accounts that reveal operational costs, the development of institutional mechanisms (legal, parliamentary, journalistic) for processing covert operations, and a cultural consensus stable enough to withstand self-examination without perceiving it as disloyalty. If the shadow war continues for another decade and its costs become visible, a future filmmaker with the artistic vision and commercial backing to take the risk may attempt the Indian equivalent of Munich. That film would represent a significant marker of India’s democratic maturity.

Q: Is the temporal distance factor the only reason for the difference?

Temporal distance is the strongest explanatory variable but not the only one. Artistic vision matters: Spielberg is a filmmaker committed to moral inquiry across his career, and his personal artistic sensibility drove Munich’s emotional architecture as much as the historical moment permitted it. Commercial calculation matters: Bollywood’s market rewards patriotic narratives more reliably than it rewards moral complexity. Institutional transparency matters: Israel’s partially open intelligence culture gave Spielberg material to work with that Indian filmmakers simply do not have access to. Cultural tradition matters: Indian cinema has a strong tradition of heroic-patriotic filmmaking that Dhurandhar extends, while Israeli cinema has a strong tradition of self-critical examination that Munich extends.

Q: How does the Munich film handle the Lillehammer affair?

Munich does not depict the Lillehammer affair directly, where Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter they misidentified as Ali Hassan Salameh in Norway in 1973. But the film incorporates the lesson of Lillehammer throughout its narrative: the constant uncertainty about whether the targets are truly guilty, the possibility of killing the wrong person, and the operational sloppiness that creeps in when assassination becomes routine. Spielberg uses this uncertainty as a narrative device to undermine Avner’s confidence. If the intelligence might be wrong, if the targets might not be guilty, then the moral foundation of the entire campaign is unstable. Dhurandhar includes no equivalent uncertainty about target identity, which removes the strongest available argument for moral complexity.

Q: Can both films be right about what revenge does to the avenger?

Both films can be right because they describe different kinds of revenge at different historical moments. Munich’s argument that revenge corrupts the avenger is supported by documented cases of psychological damage among intelligence operatives who conduct assassinations over extended periods. Dhurandhar’s implicit argument that revenge can be performed with moral clarity is not inherently false either: some operatives do maintain psychological stability throughout careers involving lethal operations. The question is not which individual response is more common but which response a film chooses to dramatize and why. Munich dramatizes the worst-case psychological outcome because its artistic project is to warn. Dhurandhar dramatizes the best-case psychological outcome because its artistic project is to inspire.

Q: How do the two films treat their respective governments?

Munich portrays the Israeli government with considerable skepticism. Golda Meir authorizes the operation but the film suggests she is acting against her own instincts, compromising democratic values for security imperatives. The bureaucratic apparatus behind the operation is depicted as cold, calculating, and willing to use Avner as a disposable instrument. Dhurandhar treats the Indian government apparatus with more deference. The institutional authority behind the operation is portrayed as wise, purposeful, and genuinely concerned with national security rather than political calculation. The difference reflects each film’s position on whether the assassination campaign represents a failure or a triumph of democratic governance.

Q: What role does music play in shaping each film’s moral register?

John Williams composed Munich’s score with deliberate restraint, using sparse instrumentation and dissonant undertones to create an atmosphere of unease rather than triumph. During assassination sequences, the music often drops out entirely, forcing the audience to experience the violence without emotional guidance. Dhurandhar’s score operates on opposite principles: patriotic themes swell during action sequences, percussion builds during stalking sequences, and the emotional payoff of successful eliminations is amplified by triumphant musical resolution. Music in Munich serves to withhold catharsis; music in Dhurandhar serves to deliver it. The difference in scoring philosophy mirrors the difference in each film’s relationship to the audience’s desire for emotional satisfaction.

Q: Why did Spielberg choose to include the World Trade Center in Munich’s final shot?

The inclusion of the Twin Towers in Munich’s final frame was Spielberg’s most explicit argument about the cycle of violence. By placing the towers behind Avner as he refuses to return to Israel, Spielberg connected the 1972 revenge campaign to the twenty-first century’s defining terrorist attack, arguing that retaliatory violence does not end cycles of terrorism but perpetuates them. The shot transforms Munich from a historical drama into a cautionary tale about the present. No equivalent forward-looking visual exists in Dhurandhar, because the film’s project is to validate the present rather than warn about the future. Including a visual equivalent, perhaps the Pahalgam massacre site or a reference to ongoing threats, would have undermined the emotional closure the film’s ending is designed to provide.

Q: Is Dhurandhar state propaganda or commercial cinema?

The distinction may be less meaningful than it appears. Dhurandhar was produced by a commercial studio, cast with major stars, and marketed as mainstream entertainment. No evidence of direct government funding or editorial control has been documented publicly. At the same time, the film received government awards, was praised by political leaders, and served a clear political function by building public support for covert operations. The question of whether commercial cinema can also be functionally propagandistic is not unique to India; similar debates surrounded American war films after September 11 and Israeli security cinema throughout the Cold War. The more productive analytical question is not whether Dhurandhar is propaganda but what social function it performs, and the answer is that it normalizes the existence of India’s covert campaign.

Q: Which film is more operationally accurate?

Munich’s operational accuracy has been debated extensively by former Mossad officials. Some praised its depiction of tradecraft, surveillance methods, and the emotional toll of prolonged covert operations. Others noted significant liberties, particularly in the composite nature of the protagonist and the dramatic embellishment of certain assassinations. Dhurandhar’s operational accuracy is harder to assess because India’s shadow war operations remain classified and unacknowledged. The film’s depiction of motorcycle-borne assassinations, close-range shootings, and surveillance methodology is consistent with what open-source reporting has documented about the real operations, but without official confirmation, the comparison remains speculative.

Q: How do both films address the question of whether assassination works?

Munich explicitly argues that assassination does not work as a long-term strategy. Avner’s handler tells him near the film’s end that every man they killed has been replaced, and the replacement is often more radical than the original. The campaign achieved tactical results but strategic futility. Dhurandhar implicitly argues that assassination does work, presenting each elimination as a meaningful reduction in the terrorist threat. The campaign achieves both tactical and strategic success, and the nation is safer for it. The disagreement between the two films mirrors a genuine analytical debate about the effectiveness of targeted killings as a counter-terrorism strategy, a debate that remains unresolved in both academic literature and intelligence practice.

Q: What does the comparison teach about revenge narratives across cultures?

The comparison teaches that revenge narratives are not universal but culturally specific, shaped by the historical moment, institutional transparency, cultural readiness for self-examination, and the relationship between the audience and the violence being depicted. A revenge narrative produced by a nation with decades of experience processing covert violence through institutional mechanisms will look fundamentally different from one produced by a nation still establishing the legitimacy of its covert campaign. Neither narrative is more truthful than the other; both are honest reflections of what their respective societies need to hear at their respective historical moments.

Q: Could a morally complex Indian revenge film succeed commercially?

The question remains open because the experiment has not been conducted at scale. Smaller Indian films have demonstrated audience appetite for moral complexity on sensitive subjects, including terrorism, communal violence, and state power. But no major Bollywood production backed by a top-tier star has attempted to present India’s shadow war with Munich-level ambiguity. The commercial risk is significant: the existing audience for Indian revenge cinema has been conditioned by films like Dhurandhar to expect validation rather than interrogation, and a film that subverted those expectations might alienate its core audience without attracting a replacement audience large enough to justify the production investment. The question will eventually be answered, but it may require either a filmmaker with sufficient cultural authority to take the risk or a production model that does not depend on opening-weekend box office performance.

Q: How do international audiences respond differently to Munich and Dhurandhar?

Munich was designed for a global audience and received global distribution. Its moral complexity was legible across cultural contexts because the revenge-corrupts-the-avenger narrative is a familiar literary and cinematic trope in Western storytelling traditions. Dhurandhar was designed primarily for an Indian audience and achieved its deepest cultural resonance domestically. International audiences who lack familiarity with the India-Pakistan shadow war context may experience the film primarily as an action thriller rather than as the cultural event it represents in India. The difference in international legibility reflects the difference between a film that engages universal moral questions and one that engages nationally specific political ones.

Q: What role do the films’ screenwriters play in shaping their moral registers?

Munich’s screenplay was co-written by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America, and Eric Roth. Kushner brought to the project a dramatist’s commitment to moral ambiguity and political complexity, and his influence is visible in Munich’s dialogue scenes, particularly the extended conversations where characters articulate competing moral positions without the film endorsing any single one. Kushner’s background in theater, where ambiguity is a structural principle, helped shape Munich’s interrogative register. Dhurandhar’s screenplay emerged from a different creative tradition. Bollywood screenwriting conventions prioritize clear moral lines, emotionally satisfying arcs, and audience identification with the protagonist’s goals. The screenplay provides exactly what these conventions demand: a protagonist whose cause is just, antagonists whose guilt is unambiguous, and a resolution that delivers the emotional payoff the audience has been primed to expect. Both screenplays are successful within their respective traditions; the traditions themselves produce the moral divergence.

Q: How do the two films handle the question of who gives the order?

The question of political authorization is central to both films’ moral architectures. Munich shows Golda Meir authorizing the operation in a scene that emphasizes the weight of the decision. Meir is depicted as a grandmother figure forced by circumstance into ordering assassinations, and the tension between her maternal demeanor and her lethal authority creates a dissonance that the film exploits for moral effect. The authorization scene argues that even well-intentioned democratic leaders are corrupted by the decision to kill. Dhurandhar’s authorization architecture is less personalized. The order comes through institutional channels, and the film does not dwell on the moral weight borne by the individual who signs the authorization. By diffusing the authorization across an institution rather than concentrating it in a single decision-maker, Dhurandhar implicitly argues that the responsibility for covert action is shared rather than individual, which reduces the moral burden on any single figure and makes the decision seem less like a moral compromise and more like standard institutional procedure.

Q: Do both films accurately depict the intelligence tradecraft involved?

Both films take creative liberties with tradecraft while grounding their depictions in plausible operational procedures. Munich’s depiction of Mossad’s European operations has been praised by some former intelligence officials for capturing the atmosphere of cold-war-era intelligence work: the reliance on informants, the painstaking surveillance, the construction of cover identities, and the logistical challenges of operating in foreign cities. Other former officials have noted that the film dramatizes and compresses operations that in reality unfolded over months into scenes that suggest days. Dhurandhar’s depiction of tradecraft has been compared favorably to documented patterns of the real shadow war: motorcycle-borne shootings in urban settings, close-range engagements, and rapid disappearance. The film’s tactical sequences are consistent with open-source reporting about how the real eliminations have been conducted, though without official confirmation, the accuracy of any specific scene remains speculative.

Q: What can we learn from comparing the two films’ production timelines?

Munich entered production in June 2005 and was released in December 2005, a remarkably compressed timeline that reflected Spielberg’s ability to work at extraordinary speed and his sense of urgency about the film’s contemporary relevance. Despite this speed, the film had the benefit of decades of published research, journalism, and memoir material about Operation Wrath of God that provided its factual foundation. Dhurandhar’s production timeline, while less publicly documented, also reflected a sense of cultural urgency: the filmmakers recognized that India’s shadow war was generating massive public interest and that a film capturing this moment would find an enormous audience. The difference in production context is that Spielberg had thirty-three years of available material to draw from, while Dhurandhar’s filmmakers were working with contemporary events whose full scope and implications were still emerging. This difference in available material partly explains the difference in moral depth: Spielberg could portray complexity because complexity had been documented; Dhurandhar could not portray consequences that had not yet occurred.

Q: How does the Lillehammer affair shape Munich’s moral architecture?

The Lillehammer affair, in which Mossad agents in Norway killed Ahmed Bouchikhi, an innocent Moroccan waiter they mistook for Ali Hassan Salameh in July 1973, is the factual foundation for Munich’s moral architecture even though the film does not depict the incident directly. The knowledge that Mossad killed the wrong man haunts every scene in which Avner’s team studies intelligence files and debates whether their targets are truly guilty. Spielberg uses the audience’s awareness of real historical failures to generate suspense not about whether the team will succeed operationally but about whether they can trust the intelligence they have been given. The Lillehammer affair proves that assassination programs make mistakes, and Munich exploits that proof to question every certainty the film’s characters carry. Without the Lillehammer affair in the historical record, Munich’s moral architecture would be speculative rather than empirically grounded. India’s shadow war has not produced a documented equivalent, which means that the empirical foundation for questioning the campaign’s operational precision does not currently exist in the public domain.