When Black September, a fringe militant offshoot of the Palestinian liberation movement, took 11 Israeli nationals hostage, murdering all of them within 24 hours along with a German police officer during the 1972 Munich Olympics, it was notable for being the first time the entire world experienced tragedy simultaneously, beamed into their homes. The 20th Olympiad was heralded as the first time an American television network would take advantage of revolutionary-at-the-time satellite technology to broadcast live programming and competition footage around the world, with the team at ABC Sports working the graveyard shift to present recaps of the previous day’s events during U.S. prime-time hours. After gunfire broke out in the early morning hours of September 5 at the Olympic village, only a few hundred meters away from their television studio, the small ABC subunit was logistically well-situated to turn their cameras away from the still ongoing games and toward a life-and-death drama playing out literally in front of them. Reducing the efforts to rescue a dozen people (as well as the Palestinian struggle writ large) to “drama” is, arguably, in poor taste, but it’s germane to Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5. The film narrows its scope to the nuts and bolts of pivoting an intricately choreographed sports broadcast to hard journalism in a confusing new world — even the term “terrorist” itself is treated as an almost alien concept — while occasionally pausing so that its characters can acknowledge the unsettling threshold being crossed with the blurring of news and entertainment (as one character prophetically frames the coverage of a boxing match between the U.S. and Cuba early on in the film: “It’s not about politics, it’s about emotion”).
As with Steven Spielberg’s Munich — which used the massacre as the inciting incident for Israel’s botched attempts at counter-assasination and retribution, compressing the events of this film to about 10 minutes of screen time — September 5 keeps both the Israeli athletes and Black September at an almost symbolic remove. Instead, the film is laser-focused on the efforts of the sleep-deprived sports journalists at ABC Sports serving as the eyes and ears of the world. Led by legendary television executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), presented here as a brusque careerist who seizes on the significance of the story even as his network bosses insist they’re out of their depth covering volatile geopolitics, the ABC crew approach the evolving story as a series of logistical challenges requiring equal parts resourcefulness and subterfuge. With television cameras exclusively being used in controlled settings like a studio and in-the-field photography requiring 16mm cameras (which demands an innate lag time for the film to then be developed), covering the story wasn’t simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. At the urging of neophyte studio director Geoff Mason (John Magaro), a cumbersome TV camera is wheeled onto a neighboring grassy knoll and pointed directly at the Israeli athletes’ apartment while a young PA outfitted in a fake badge and tracksuit was able to surreptitiously run film magazines and sandwiches out to journalists positioned within the fortified Olympic village. Even the ability to broadcast the story live required horse-trading with competing networks. In the film’s telling, ABC shared access to the satellite with CBS, forcing Arledge to burn up the phone lines, relinquishing coveted time slots to keep the live coverage going before a graphic designer arrived at an ingenious, lo-fi solution to tagging their broadcast. In a breakthrough for corporate marketing, ABC was able to syndicate its broadcast to other channels while still promoting its own network.
Fehlbaum’s decision to foreground innovation, speed, and almost reckless “rule-breaking” has the tendency to frame September 5 as a thrilling “men on a mission” film — it features an overwhelmingly male cast, with the primary exception being Leonie Benesch, recently of The Teachers’ Lounge, as a young German translator who quickly demonstrates her value — albeit one tempered by the grim reality of the situation. The decision to show the efforts of the police to negotiate with the terrorists or establish snipers on neighboring rooftops may make for thrilling television, but it sets off a panic and a tense (possibly invented) confrontation with the German police upon realizing that Black September is watching the broadcast as well. But there’s something more complicated at play here, with longtime operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) expressing justifiable concern that the broadcast is unwittingly giving a voice to violent extremists who might exploit a captivated global audience by murdering a hostage on television. One can sense the rules of what can and can’t go out live over the air being rewritten in real-time while more complicated questions, such as what are the ethics of reducing the news to an easily-digestible narrative with clearly established heroes and villains, simmer in the film’s background. Without overstating its case, September 5 treats the Munich Olympics as patient zero of cable news with its round-the-clock coverage and so-called experts vamping to kill time. Meanwhile, our characters learn the hard way the perils of rushing a story to get ahead of competing outlets while relying on sources who might be incentivized to spread disinformation.
Back in the spring, Alex Garland’s wildly divisive Civil War was defended in some corners as actually being a sly indictment of the very journalists it textually valorized; an argument which feels far more appropriate for the outwardly jaundiced September 5. We’re meant to recognize the long-lasting and corrosive tendrils of Arledge’s “infotainment” approach to reporting; particularly in framing the narrative to appeal to American audiences once it’s discovered one of the Israeli athletes, David Berger, emigrated from the United States (as always, one must play up the local angle). There’s also the misplaced faith in ABC deferring to “official sources,” in this case the German government and state police who are both ill-prepared for militarized engagement and desperate to present a positive vision for the country 30 years after the Nazis left power. As the film barrels toward unimaginable tragedy on an isolated airstrip in the German countryside, we can sense the film intentionally spinning off its axis. Information becomes more sparse and less reliable, yet the monster that’s been created needs to be constantly fed. After ABC prematurely had in-studio host Jim McKay relay a rosy account of all the hostages being safely rescued (couched as “as we are hearing”), we witness Arledge and Bader share a celebratory drink to revel in the ratings bonanza, a celebration of mercenary concerns which is doomed to curdle once accounts of what’s really happened start to trickle in.
Employing a handheld, vérité style — the film was shot on a mix of 16mm and digital with vintage lenses to accentuate the low-light graininess of the image, further emphasizing the era-specific production design and analog aesthetic — Fehlbaum’s approach is fundamentally modest. The film prioritizes immediacy and workmanlike ingenuity over scale or grand summations, with the action rarely venturing far from the ABC control room or beyond the minute-by-minute demands of covering the standoff. September 5 treats the literal distance from the story — something that becomes even more pronounced once the hostages are moved to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, relying upon incomplete accounts being relayed over the phone — as a source of tension and a smart filmmaking choice in trying to convey the sense of collective helplessness. Quite plainly, if the television cameras don’t see something, then neither do the characters (or we the audience). That lack of a global view, as well as the film’s general disinterest in pulling out wider to contextualize the Palestinian cause, is no doubt going to be a source of frustration for some, particularly in these fraught times. The characters literally plead ignorance as it pertains to Black September — the film uses Benjamin Walker’s smug Peter Jennings to offer breadcrumbs of historical insight, delivering his lines as though they were an auditory eye-roll — while the immediacy of the siege allows little room to explore the motives of the armed guerrillas (as the film refers to them). While there are unavoidable echoes of the Nova Music Festival in the Munich massacre, it should be noted that the film was well into production when October 7 happened and that its consternation over the media exploiting one tragedy shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a response, in any particular direction, to a more recent one. Although, as the film strongly implies, we as a culture feel doomed to keep making the same missteps in chasing commoditized “emotion,” and maybe that’s lesson enough
DIRECTOR: Tim Fehlbaum; CAST: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures; IN THEATERS: December 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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