Released 2024. Director: Tim Fehlbaum
FOR MANY PEOPLE, THE FIRST THING that comes to mind when someone mentions the 1972 Munich Olympics is the terrorist attack. A global sporting event organised to promote peace and cross-cultural understanding hijacked by violence is unfortunately the one lasting memory.
On the 5th of September, Palestinian terrorist group Black September held the Israeli team hostage inside the Olympic Village. The ensuing siege and botched getaway left 17 dead. This movie is told entirely from the perspective of the ABC broadcast team onsite. Almost all the action onscreen takes place in the control room and hallways, thereby limiting the audience’s view and information to only what the team could find out at the time.
When gunshots were heard and the team learned that some athletes had been taken hostage, their reporting instincts kicked in and they quickly set up cameras as far as they could physically go – on a slope overlooking the village, on a balcony with a direct view of the Israeli apartments. When police cordoned off the area and restricted access, one of them passed himself off as an athlete, complete with a fake ID, to smuggle film canisters between the control room and news anchor Peter Jennings who had snuck into a building in the village to report on the unfolding event.
To keep themselves up to date, Marianne Gebhardt, the only German in the room, interpreted communications from local authorities and the media. President of ABC Sports Roone Arlege (Peter Sarsgaard) made the call to get in, go deep and broadcast live (this was the first Olympics to use satellite for live reporting). Producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) rallied the troops, leading the charge into a new territory. Fact is, the crew was there to report on sports; now suddenly they found themselves dealing with serious hard news.
Part of the tension in a movie like this is seeing people make hard choices and forced into decision-making in a flash. This is a movie about quick thinking under pressure, whether the decisions ultimately proved to be right or wrong. You find yourself seizing an unexpected opportunity to be one of the few on the scene of a major global event, then you realise your choices have far greater consequences because the terrorists are kept informed by your live broadcast. What do you do?
In the heat of the evolving situation there are ethical questions to address. Should they be broadcasting live what they’re filming? What if the camera captures someone getting killed in real time? Where is the line for editorial control? As operations chief Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) reminded Mason sharply at one point, news reporting is not a competition and fact-checking is imperative. This tussle between speed and accuracy is even more relevant in today’s Internet reporting when any dribs of uncorroborated information can be published instantly and circulated widely without restraint. The sweat on the foreheads of these men only highlights the need for cool heads to prevail in an unusually high-pressure and ethically fraught environment.
There were times I wanted the cameras to get out of the studio and cut to where the crisis was taking place to let me see the terrorists and the hostages behind curtains and walls. In a conventional thriller it would, but September 5 confines the audience to experience the event from only what the crew could see and hear at the time. In this regard director Tim Fehlbaum has done very well in establishing the scene, maintaining the restlessness while dialling up the anxiety meter. He makes you feel you’re part of the energy and stress behind a historic news coverage.
The technical aspects of the movie are faithfully authentic. We see how a TV studio functions at a time before email and mobile phone, unwieldy cameras and other pre-digital “old-school” equipment including the tedious process of creating graphics and titles to superimpose on screen. The interviews we see of Jim McKay is archival footage cleverly edited to trick us into thinking McKay was right there in the next room although there was never an actor playing the anchor.
Unlike Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2006), which is a more polished production with a narrative built around a protagonist and focuses on the aftermath, September 5 has no plot, at least not in the usual sense in the thriller genre. In essence it’s a behind-the-scene of a major event being flipped into the main feature, with enough tension and intensity to pull through on its own merit.
While the movie is about TV newsroom’s handling of a siege in an unprecedented way, the absence of a political point of view is like avoiding eye contact with the elephant in the room. Instead, more is uttered about this Olympics being Germany’s chance to redeem its image after the Nazis used the 1936 Olympics as propaganda and how terrorism against Jews on German soil now would only exacerbate the national shame.
Given the timing of its release, it is unavoidable for the movie to stoke feelings about the ongoing Middle East crisis. September 5 does not go any deeper than a cursory remark on this specific Palestinian-Israeli conflict and in doing so, its impact is lessened when the movie concludes without even taking a brief dive beyond the ramifications. Admittedly it’s a minefield of sensitivities but if you decide to make a movie like this, you don’t shy away from taking a position, even as you sit diplomatically on the fence.
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Where to watch "September 5":
I don't remember much about Munich Olympics, as I was too young when it happened. I only knew about it from Spielberg's movie. I hear ya about the fact that the film shy away from taking a position. It's perhaps by design, given the heightened sensitivity around this topic. I think their approach is more about 'documenting' the ordeal, which I think they did a good job of as it's quite gripping.