‘September 5’ is gripping drama set at the ’72 Olympics
“September 5” — 3 stars
On the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, members of the militant organization known as Black September attacked the Israeli Olympic team at the Summer Games in Munich. They infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two team members and took nine others hostage, demanding the release of 200 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. After a daylong standoff, a firefight at a local airport ended with all the hostages and five of the terrorists dead.
“September 5” is not really about that, though. Instead, it’s a tense ticktocker that dramatizes what went on inside the ABC command post at the Games — the decisions and quandaries faced by a group of sports journalists and broadcast technicians suddenly faced with airing an unthinkable tragedy, live and in real time. What’s news? What’s exploitation? What information enlightens the viewers and what helps the terrorists?
These are all smart, purposeful questions, and a decade ago they would have made for a galvanizing thriller about media ethics and journalistic responsibility. And as directed and co-written by Swiss filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum and acted to the nines by a fine cast, “September 5” is still an excellent movie. It’s just that the questions it asks about newsgathering are the wrong ones for 2025.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Fehlbaum’s script, written with Moritz Binder (Alex David is also credited as a writer), stays largely inside the control center ABC has set up near enough to the Olympic Village to hear the rattle of automatic gunfire in the early hours of the 5th. Before then, we’ve seen the night shift head to their hotel rooms for well-earned rest after relaying American swimmer Mark Spitz’s seventh gold medal win to prime-time viewers back home.
Out of the scrum of men and women lit up by monitors, we focus on three: Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), head of ABC Sports; Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), the network’s director of operations for the Games; and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), a segment producer getting his first shot at running the show. It’s Mason who’s on the job when the shots ring out, and when it becomes apparent that they ARE gunshots and something serious is going down, he wakes the other two and the rest of the crew for what becomes a long, grueling, terrible day at the office.
Of the three, Sarsgaard’s Arledge is the soft-spoken risk-taker, a media “genius” whose quixotic instincts make for great TV. Bader, by contrast, is the one with his eye on the ethics of the situation, his awareness of the fact that great TV doesn’t always mean *moral* TV compounded by his Jewishness. Mason, in Magaro’s white-knuckle performance, is caught in the middle, leaning toward the scoop, the gotcha, the thing that’s best for ABC, but the larger drama of “September 5” can be read on his face as the stakes get darker and bloodier over the course of the day.
Also memorable is Leonie Benesch (“The Teachers’ Lounge”) as Marianne Gebhardt, the German interpreter who becomes an integral part of the day’s reporting and the one person in the room who doesn’t have the network’s best interests at heart. Almost as a side note, the movie reveals a number of technical conventions invented that day out of blind expedience that we now take for granted, like the on-screen network IDs known as “spiders” when CBS, which has the satellite spot, allows ABC to air an interview with one of the surviving Israeli athletes, Tuvia Sokolsky (Stiev Neubert).
But the film’s main order of business is separating the commercial choices from the human dilemmas. “Can we show someone being shot to death?” Mason asks early on, and that’s one of the easier ones. (I’m pretty sure they decide the answer is no.) Does airing images of the German police moving in make sense when the attackers are watching TV, too? Bader poses the biggest question of them all — the one that gets to why terrorists act in the first place. “If they shoot someone on live television,” he asks Arledge, “whose story is that? Is it ours or is it theirs?”
Food for thought, indeed, and I hope Journalism 101 classes chew on it good and hard. But, to be honest, is this what popular movies should be wrestling with at a time when the news business as a civic responsibility is nearing extinction — when local news outlets have dried into news deserts, when web headline hits matter more than the story, and when owners can dictate what their staffs can and cannot publish?
“September 5” may be out of sync with current attitudes toward the Arab/Israeli conflict, but that’s to be expected in a project that was already in postproduction by June 2023. More crucially, the filmmakers’ focus on granular principles feels like a lost opportunity when the entire business is in a spiral of existential distress.
“September 5” is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.
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Rated R for adult language. In English, German and Hebrew, with English subtitles. 95 minutes.