September 5 (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

In the grand tradition of news outlet dramas of flashpoint historical events, September 5 capably and compellingly recreates the events of that date in 1972 at the Munich Summer Olympics. More accurately, the primary setting is inside the ABC Sports broadcasting control room. During an otherwise routine schedule, gunshots ring out through the night, and it becomes slowly revealed that agents of Palestinian militant terrorist group Black September have infiltrated the athletes' village, killed two Israelis, and taken nine others hostage. Producers and editors, technicians and reporters alike, the cast of assembled characters struggle to make sense of the crisis as it unfolds before their eyes, eventually deciding to allow the events caught on camera to be seen live around the world.

In our age of cameras everywhere and nonstop news, it can be hard to remember a time when our daily existence wasn't mediated at all. Even growing up in the '90s, I can recall, meant a certain hour or so of dedicated television time, usually for the evening news and at least one episode of a show. So some viewers may not be able to empathize with the experience of watching such world-shaking events unfolding in the moment; much less, the agony of those execs in the newsroom. But director Tim Fehlbaum and his team skillfully approach the story as a grounded, urgent, and intentionally intense process, making the film something as close to an immersive experience as a docudrama can be. The silver screen even looked low-resolution, grainy and warm like 16mm news videos of the time, mostly handheld to effortlessly feel more thrilling by the minute. And don't get me started on the amazing sound design, which is crisp and clear and expansive and tactile and all the things you don't really expect in what is essentially a chamber thriller.

Actors do exceptionally well here with their demanding material, which by all accounts is remarkably well-researched and accurate to real events. Yet don't go into this film expecting a historical treatise on the geopolitical or religious or racial contexts for the massacre or even into its fallout, memorably dramatized by Steven Spielberg in 2005. Rather, this film is presented almost as a lesson in journalism in new media: the live broadcasting of events isn't invisible to the terrorists themselves, after all, which irrevocably complicates the situation and our assessment of it. And while it seems curious, perhaps, for the producers to want to tell this story --and in this way -- at this particular moment in our contemporary world, I am somewhat relieved that the film doubles down on its internal historicizing, rendering it politically toothless in a world currently eager to bite down on low-hanging fruit. Indeed, this choice largely makes the film a snapshot of a particular moment in history, made compelling by its counterintuitive and refreshing focus.

I want to defer, here in my final and somewhat jumbled thoughts, to critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who eloquently mused about the admittedly lacking awareness, in September 5, of context or lasting implications of media coverage during crises. Specifically, he talks about certain characters and how, after this story, they continued on to shape certain aspects of American media through relationships with politics and politicians who, together, began using immediate broadcasting access to shape American policies:

"What we’re seeing in September 5 is the birth of live news as entertainment. It’s the opening salvo in a long and sadly successful war against journalistic ethics and ideals that would lead to the current pathetic conditions of cable and Internet 'news,' which consist largely of 'takes' rather than original reporting. That nobody involved in the 1972 crisis could have foreseen where things would go lends poignance [and, I would add, urgency] to a movie that’s otherwise concerned only with what’s in front of it."