• Sun. Feb 9th, 2025

Movie Curiosities

The online diary of an aspiring movie nerd

Yes, September 5 is a movie about the Munich massacre. There have been quite a few depictions of this horrible incident, most notably with Munich in 2005, the Steven Spielberg project that took quite a few Oscar nominations and failed to win a single one. (Yes, the movie lost Best Picture to Crash that year. Have I mentioned recently that 2005 was a fucking awful year for movies?!) For those who need a refresher, let me bring you up to speed.

The year was 1972, and the Summer Olympics were set in Munich. Quite notably, this was the first time Germany had hosted the Olympics since the fall of the Third Reich. This relatively recent history likely played a reason why there were no armed guards at the Olympic Village that year. I might further add that the Berlin Wall was still in place, dividing Germany between two wildly different systems of government, so it wasn’t exactly a good time for the post-war nation.

On September 5th, nine Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage in their own Olympic Village apartment by armed Palestinian terrorists. What followed was a day-long international hostage crisis, in which the terrorists demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. The standoff was made significantly worse by the local police in Germany, who were pitifully unqualified to handle such a scenario on such a scale, constitutionally forbidden from seeking the help of the nation’s army, and too proud to accept help from the Israeli armed forces.

Long story short, the terrorists eventually agreed to safe passage for themselves and the hostages out to Cairo, where the hostages would remain held while negotiations continued. Unfortunately, this “safe passage” was a double-cross engineered by the German police with the intention of killing the terrorists and freeing the hostages. This turned out to be yet another show of brash incompetence from the German police involved. When the dust had cleared, all nine hostages were dead, along with five of the eight terrorists and a German police officer.

September 5 portrays the events of the day from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew. In fact, we never leave the studio at any point in the movie. The hostage crisis is unfolding 100 yards away, and we never see any of it except for what we get from camera feeds and phone calls. In fact, half the film is comprised of authentic archival news footage shot and broadcast during the actual hostage crisis. Hell, the production team went all-out in designing a full-size replica of the actual ABC Sports studio for use as the set.

There’s so much to unpack here.

First of all, consider that this movie is about a team of sports journalists. They were hired for the specific job of covering the Olympics, and now they’re covering a hostage crisis. A story that should go to a totally different news team, or maybe even a totally different network. But the sports journalists are already there on site and the whole Olympic Village is on lockdown, so this is the team everyone is stuck with.

And I do mean everyone is stuck with this particular news team. The ABC Sports crew is broadcasting the Olympic Games worldwide at a time when satellite feed is still a relatively new technology. So new, in fact, that there’s only one satellite in orbit to share between all the major networks. Which means that if our intrepid sports crew wants to stay on the air and keep broadcasting this breaking news story about an ongoing crisis, they’ll have to find some way to compromise and let CBS or NBC get a piece of the action. Not that anyone from CBS or NBC is literally sticking their neck out like the team at ABC, but them’s the breaks.

Getting back to the satellite point, this is the first time in history when a crisis was actively unfolding on TV screens across the world like this. Minute by minute, live and in color. And this is being done without the internet, without smartphones, without any kind of digital technology at all. Everyone is working with clunky radios, landline telephones, big heavy film canisters, and film that has to be chemically developed before it can be cut and spliced by hand. And because none of this has ever been done before with the speed and urgency of real-time news coverage (something we’ve grown accustomed to since the advent of CNN), we get to watch problems and issues get addressed with crafty solutions and innovations on the fly.

Put another way, it’s like the film is showing us the invention of news media as we know it today. Fascinating stuff.

On another level, it bears repeating that these are sports journalists without the training to cover anything like a hostage crisis or an international news story, and they’re covering a story that demands round-the-clock coverage like nothing the world had seen before. I might add that the event was extremely chaotic in the moment, and our team of journalists were stuck with the unenviable task of trying to confirm the truth among so many swirling rumors. (Again, the goddamn German police were no help here, as the local police and government were so incompetent at handling the situation and so desperate to come out of this in a positive light. So of course they contributed to the cover-ups and misinformation and confusion.)

More to the point, this scenario means that our team is faced with so many hypotheticals that they are simply not prepared for. If one of the hostages gets shot, can they show that on the air? If a camera shows the German police getting into position for a rescue attempt, can they put that on the air without tipping off the terrorists? (Though maybe that wouldn’t have been an issue if the cops had taken the basic step of cutting off power to the apartments, the fucking idiots!) Hell, it’s an open question as to whether covering this news story at all is exploitative of the hostages’ suffering, playing into the terrorists’ hands by giving them a platform and spreading global panic, or giving comfort to the hostages’ families who can’t learn about what’s happening from anyone else.

Why and for whom are these journalists covering this story? Are they doing this for the network and their sponsors? Are they doing this to glorify their own careers? Are they covering the story because it’s in the public interest and for the common good? Or are they doing it for the athletes, just to make sure that somebody is there to tell their story?

All these questions prove to be especially relevant in hindsight, with the knowledge of how everything plays out. Over the course of this movie, these people will have seen and suffered through serious shit. They’ll have seen violence and death and suffering, enough to leave anyone traumatized — even a professional. And that’s all compounded by the tragic ending. It’s easy to feel like a failure when so much work was put in just to get a downer ending.

But did the journalists fail? Did they really? Did they ever actually owe anyone a happy ending? Is there anything more they could have or should have done to affect the outcome? These are all difficult questions, and the film is deeply compelling in its thoughtful yet subtle examination of them.

Peter Sarsgaard gets top billing as Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports. He’s a fascinating character, trying to effectively juggle so many different demands while tirelessly working behind the scenes to get the team what they need. To be sure, Arledge shows a clear preference toward delivering whatever will keep the audience engaged and the ratings up, but he’s consistently willing to bend on that — to a point — in the interest of safety and journalistic ethics. It’s really quite fascinating to watch Arledge find creative means of threading the needle to have it both ways.

Yet Arledge spends most of his time working off-camera, too busy to serve as our de facto protagonist. That would be Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), an up-and-coming producer who suddenly finds himself tasked with directing the control room after a career in covering minor league baseball. While Arledge and all the other higher-ups have their conflicting priorities and orders, it’s ultimately Mason who’s stuck with making the decision about what goes to air. Mason is also directly responsible for the safety of the crew and the quality of the on-air product, forced to improvise all manner of solutions to get boots on the ground and news on the air.

Then we have Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), the head of operations and elder statesman of ABC Sports. He’s the loudest and most vocal advocate for stringent ethics in journalism. On top of that, he’s also the resident Jew and de facto advocate for the hostages themselves. We’ve also got Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem), a French technician keeping up a mutual post-war cultural grudge with the local Germans.

Oh, did I forget to mention that part? Yeah, on top of everything else this unprepared and ill-experienced sports crew has to worry about, they’re also trying to manage international tensions between a multicultural staff. There is a lot going on in this movie, y’all.

But the MVP of the team is unquestionably Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), the only journalist on staff who speaks fluent German. She is the workhorse of the crew, a talented journalist in her own right with the vital ability to translate German notes and transmissions. So many ideas and strategies in this movie live and die on whether the team can put Marianne exactly where they need her in the moment. Naturally, this leads to some neat little moments when Marianne provides some much-needed insight into Germany’s perspective. I was also rather fond of a nicely underplayed yet no less incisive moment when a male character sends Marianne to get him a coffee, only to have the request blow up in his face.

So, are there any nitpicks? Well, the pacing can admittedly get a bit wonky in the mad dash to cram 24 hours into 90 minutes. The plot moves so quickly, you’d think they could somehow develop film instantaneously. It’s easy to lose track of certain details, with regards to who was moving what to where and when. Yet at the same time, the proceedings are nowhere near as chaotic as, say, Saturday Night.

Overall, I had a great time with September 5. I love the gritty presentation that portrays all the characters in a nuanced and three-dimensional way. I love the layers and layers of thematic depth and the dynamic plot, all packed into a brisk 90 minutes. I appreciate how the film doesn’t glorify the journalists (looking at you, Civil War), but asks fascinating questions about what their role entails, why it matters, and what it really means to live and work in a perpetually media-hungry world.

This one is absolutely worth checking out.

By Curiosity Inc.

I hold a B.S. in Bioinformatics, the only one from Pacific University's Class of '09. I was the stage-hand-in-chief of my high school drama department and I'm a bass drummer for the Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers. I dabble in video games and I'm still pretty good at DDR. My primary hobby is going online for upcoming movie news. I am a movie buff, a movie nerd, whatever you want to call it. Comic books are another hobby, but I'm not talking about Superman or Spider-Man or those books that number in the triple-digits. I'm talking about Watchmen, Preacher, Sandman, etc. Self-contained, dramatic, intellectual stories that couldn't be accomplished in any other medium. I'm a proud son of Oregon, born and raised here. I've been just about everywhere in North and Central America and I love it right here.

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