In 1976 an airplane travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris made a stop in Athens and was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists. They flew the plane to the Entebbe airport in Uganda, then under the rule of the dictator Idi Amin, separated the Israeli passengers from the others and threatened to kill them if Israel didn't release several Palestinian prisoners. Israel's response was to organise one of the most perfect rescue operations in the history of rescue operations.Operation Thunderbolt was not the first dramatisation of this rescue but was the first one fully made by Israelis, with the collaboration of the Israeli government and the Israeli Air Force. This has worked simultaneously in its favour and detriment. From a purely factual and realistic perspective, it's the best dramatisation of the events. But the movie carries a slight stench of propaganda – one gets quickly tired of listening to characters declaring Israel as the greatest country in the world; even if that is true, there is a thing called modesty. Israel is a small country that has successfully repelled attacks from its neighbouring enemies. I can understand how that inflates its citizens with a sense of ego. But one thing is national pride; chauvinism is something quite different. Watching this movie I also remembered some of the criticism the Brazilian movie Elite Squad was levelled with: this movie sounds and looks like a massive recruitment campaign. Join the army and kick ass! The movie also has a bipolar approach to some of the factual events of the hijacking. On the one hand, it surprisingly portrays the terrorists in a very objective light. I can't imagine a better choice to play the terrorist leader than the devilish Klaus Kinski, an actor who portrayed evil so seductively. Kinski's terrorist sees himself as a freedom fighter, an idealist who believes in the Palestinian cause. He's smart, in control and attentive to the needs of his hostages. Kinski plays Wilfried Böse. Böse's terrorist career was recently portrayed in the French TV series Carlos, which briefly references the Entebbe Operation. Böse was a left-wing revolutionary who opposed imperialism and dreamed of a world revolution to make the world a fairer place. Like many revolutionaries of his time, he embraced the Palestinian causes as a just one. This movie sadly skips most of the historical context but still portrays him as a credible person and not as a caricature.On the other hand the movie fails to clearly address the fact that this wasn't about kidnapping Jewish people but Israeli citizens. In the harrowing sequence when the passengers are separated in two groups, we're shown the passengers being divided between Jews and Gentiles. In fact several Jewish people who did not have an Israeli passport were released. The terrorists retained only Israelis citizens. This for me is the movie's major weakness – trying to frame the event as a crime of anti-Semitism and not putting in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where terrorists are motivated not by ethnic but political reasons. In other words, the movie shows the Israelis being kidnapped just because they're Jews and not because they belong to a country whose successive governments have been accused of committing war crimes too. This simple victimisation and lack of self-scrutiny is the strongest criticism I can level against this otherwise remarkable thriller.Politics aside, Operation Thunderbolt is an amazing adrenaline rush, tightly edited and always moving at a frantic pace, shifting between the Israeli forces and the terrorists, keeping the viewer glued to the screen as he impatiently waits for the spectacular climax. The movie opens with Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (Yehoram Gaon) training with his men for hijacking situations in a foreshadowing of the actual operation. Yonatan is never satisfied with his men's results and has them repeat the exercises over and over. Then the action moves to Athens, introducing the passengers. Several are described in broad strokes and immediately gain the viewer's sympathy. When the terrorists take over the plane, the viewer is already on the hostages' side.Although the outcome is already known, the movie sustains a high note of suspense. The ending doesn't lose one iota of its emotional impact just because we know the hostages will be saved. After sharing with the hostages their plight, I think any viewer will finish this movie feeling a triumphant joy. There are happy endings a dime a dozen and then there are endings that fill us with a deep sense of justice, that leave us with the impression that the world has been put back in order.I couldn't finish this review without praising Dov Seltzer's score, whose powerful main theme is played throughout the movie with several variations in tone, from elegiac to a fast-paced groovy theme that screams '70s. Seltzer's music is almost the cement that holds movie together and deftly underscores the tension and the horror of the story. Like the movie, the score is an unknown gem awaiting greater recognition.Menahem Golan achieved some success in the United States after this movie. He went on to make The Delta Force, with Chuck Norris. I never saw it and I don't know much about Golan's style. In this movie he thankfully didn't try to make anything too ostentatious. He shoots the scenes with simplicity and the certainty that the true story is enough to carry the movie, and indeed it is.

It seems that just after the events, the subject was so hot that is went on to be over exploited in both small and wide screen movies. Unfortunately, all movies are near-sighted and tell the story from a single point of view, the Israeli one, which seems to be deemed equivalent to the entire world's point of view. When a movie recounts historical events, I would like that movie to exploit the subject to a reasonable depth and keep the circumstances realistic. I have held the same problem against the more recent '300' movie, as well as others and this happened with most movies that have one side against another: simply telling the world "we're better than the others" isn't enough, this has to be shown from a fair and direct comparison that the spectator can relate to.

Accurately historically, keeps the rhythm to the very end. Seems even better than the two other versions of it. I liked it very much. It was a good idea and implementation the usage of real video of Israeli leaders. The film describes the Operation Entebbe, which took place on the night of July 3 and early morning of July 4, 1976. Originally called Operation Thunderbolt by the Israeli military who planned it and carried it out, and it was subsequently renamed Operation Yonatan after the raid commander, Col. Yonatan "Yoni" Netanyahu, the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid. "Yoni" was the brother of the former Israeli primer minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of the Likud party. The Israeli singer and actor Yehoram Gaon played Col. Netanyahu and there is a good acting by the German actor Klaus Kinski as the leader of the terrorist gang. A good war film but more than that a must for those who like films on international affairs.

While peace in the middle east seems as far away now as it did in 1949, you gotta hand it to em that they sure can still make a hell of a good movie.While the actual operation of the 1976 rescue of the 100+ hostages held at Entebbe airport is not probed into as much with this film as with RAID ON ENTEBBE, this is the infinitely more fun one of the two to watch. Dov Seltzer's music is really the star with this film, particularly with the really cool opening theme which plays in many variations whenever Yoni is onscreen and the theme that plays at Entebbe airport whenever it shows the guards standing around, etc. The music works best during Yoni's death scene (this is no spoiler since the events of the film are historically accurate, and pretty well-known too) where it really takes his usual theme but drags it out to sound all tragic. Gotta love the ultra-70's style filming and editing. Lots of zoom-ins and odd use of models, stock footage, and stand-ins which is sometimes cheesy, but always entertaining in some way. It's all pretty standard stuff until the ending battle, which is handled in a very high-octane way as opposed to RAID ON ENTEBBE, where they did a lot of standing around and things tended to work out better (It would be more interesting to know which of the two is more historically accurate).Klaus Kinski and Sybil Danning are the other stars here. Their problem though is that they are underused. Klaus doesn't act quite crazy enough (though he does a lot of running around and has a really cool death scene), and Sybil Danning's stunning unearthly beauty is not exploited enough, hidden behind poofy hair, bulky dress, and a large pair of sunglasses. One might be angry at watching this and not getting their full Kinski or Danning's-worth, but it's better than not having them here at all.The authenticity involved in much of the rest of the film is amazing, with Rabin and Peres doing some acting (though they never speak, on-camera and the scenes where people are talking to them look suspiciously like they used doubles) and supposedly 12 of the original hostages returned to reprise their roles in this film. However, it goes out of its way to demonize the PLO, Che Guevaranians, and Idi Amin (though with him that's another story). Everything with the villains is a lot darker and more mean-spirited than in RAID ON ENTEBBE, but it all works to make this film more fun. Just take it as entertainment and not as fact, because of course it was the winners that made this. Just a fun and fast-paced little forgotten movie. Where's the DVD?