An unremarkable real-world thriller, September 5 fails on numerous fronts: both as a film re-telling the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, and as a journalistic retrospective about TV broadcasting. It arrives with renewed relevance in light of constant, harrowing news from Palestine, but the movie’s narrowed focus — almost entirely confining the plot to the real-time developments within ABC’s Munich newsroom — is a blinkered approach that ends up saying little about the events either in retrospect, or as they unfolded in the moment.
Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum brings clockwork proficiency to his screenplay (which he co-wrote with Moritz Binder and Alex David). However, his technical acumen is in service of a mechanical cinematic experience whose political outlook is awkward at best, and status-quo fawning at worst. That the film is now on people’s Oscar radar appears to be an outcome of its appearance on one solitary list of predictions, despite it receiving little buzz out of its Venice premiere. Whether September 5 hits with award bodies remains to be seen, but to laud it with trophies would be a severe political miscalculation, an act that — like the film itself — is all bluster, and features little by way of artistic inquiry.
What is September 5 about?
In the early hours of Sept. 5, 1972, eight gunmen from the Palestinian militia Black September took the Israeli Olympic team hostage in their hotel and demanded the release of over 200 Palestinian prisoners — an event depicted in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Among the first news stories of its kind to be broadcast live around the globe, this armed encounter helped set the stage for such coverage in the future, a self-reflexivity the movie hints toward, as its journalists scramble to bring the story to a worldwide audience. Far from saints, some of its journalist characters are downright opportunistic, which begins to paint an intriguing portrait of the future of TV news. However, Fehlbaum never quite follows this instinct.
On one hand, tethering the film’s perspective to ABC’s makeshift control center offers unique insight into live broadcasting, a complex technical process seldom explored on screen. In that vein, the film is tantalizingly tactile, with its use of maps, books, and telephones re-jigged to function as radio receivers so the whole team can eavesdrop on German police scanners. On the other hand, the ethics of breakneck TV decision-making, and the media’s role in capturing the affair, which took place over 20 hours, while making harmful mistakes — like broadcasting police strategies live on air, so the attackers could get one step ahead— play out in rote fashion.
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