‘September 5’ review: a blinkered, noncommittal thriller about an Olympic hostage crisis

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.

It’s as though September 5 were obligated to touch on every item on a biopic checklist, more so the logistics of “what” and “who” rather than the more emotionally detailed “how” and “why,” without exploring the broader implications of what’s on screen. Even meeting the movie on its level, within these narrow parameters, yields disappointing drama, since the edit rarely ruminates on the momentary impact of any event or decision. “It’s not about details, it’s about EMOTIONS,” one character argues in a pivotal scene. If only the movie had followed suit. 

However, the issues don’t begin and end with how the story is told; they’re often tied to what sliver of the larger whole the movie chooses to tell (and all that it leaves to the imagination). John Magaro plays Geoffrey Mason, the spry new producer charged with making real-time editing decisions, while Peter Sarsgaard appears as executive Roone Arledge, a vulture of sorts, but a suit who gets things done against all odds. The tension between them is akin to that of film directors and studio execs battling over an edit — what’s right for the story vs. what’s best business — only in the case of an armed standoff and hostage negotiation unfolding in real time, that edit happens just seconds before images make it to air.

As the superego to Magaro and Sarsgaard’s ego and id, Ben Chaplin’s broadcasting overseer Marvin Bader is an occasional voice of reason, though his function is largely to verbalize the movie’s ethical conundrums. Few of these are allowed to play out within the drama itself, since the movie is quick to jump from any brief moment of realization or self-reflection toward the next real-world event. 

The half-baked politics of September 5.

Conspicuous by his physical absence through much of the film is a character who makes a fleeting appearance early on: TV journalist Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), whose brief dialogue in the newsroom hints at the complex politics involved. Jennings’ voice can be heard through archival audio as he narrates the hostage situation live, but any sense that his extensive experience covering the Middle East might come in handy and provide a nuanced perspective is often brushed aside by the film, and by the other characters. For instance, his suggestion that the word “terrorist” be avoided in favor of “guerillas” or “commandos” is practically treated as a punchline.

The term has since become loaded and racialized, and after a single exchange touches on this tension, the conversation quickly falls by the wayside, until the movie—in its closing titles — uses the term as well, rather than taking a more critical approach to the wider conflict between Israel and Palestine, and the way this language is weaponized (as the fictionalized Jennings had feared). No film is beholden to a more balanced view than corporate news media typically presents, but in gesturing toward complexity, September 5 sets a bare minimum target for itself that it fails to hit. It’s practically audacious in this misstep, in light of recent asymmetrical coverage of Israel’s current bombing campaign of the Gaza strip.

No such wider lens is applied to the movie, and it suffers in the process. The claustrophobia and urgency of a newsroom can make for engaging storytelling, but the film adheres to the very same limitations the reporters were constrained by at the time, as they scrambled to put two and two together. If it has any dramatic irony, it’s only toward the nation of Germany, who had hoped to use the ’72 games as a peaceful benchmark of how far they’d come since World War II. Dialogue about how German efficiency would quickly solve the crisis — when the police badly dropped the ball in reality, leading to a disastrous airfield shootout — makes it apparent that Fehlbaum and co. are capable of at least winking at the audience and folding, into the movie’s purview, a sense of foresight.

However, this broad cinematic empathy has its limits in September 5, and the movie instead wears nominally progressive notions on its sleeve through isolated newsroom incidents. A local female correspondent, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), is underestimated by her male peers, who learn to value her skills one scene later. A racist character’s remark about Arabs is swiftly rebuked by his Algerian coworker, though that’s the entire extent of the film’s perspective on Middle Eastern geopolitics. 

The only thing that matters in September 5 is the newsroom, and even when its newsmen exacerbate the crisis, or struggle with what’s right — like whether to keep their cameras trained on potential executions — the camera holds on Magaro, Sarsgaard, and Chaplin’s intense performances just long enough to conjure curiosity about their doubts. Then, as it moves on, it simply forgets that these questions were even asked in the first place, or that they matter.

September 5 is aesthetically malformed.

An early scene in September 5 has all the intensity of a CIA control room in one of Paul Greengrass’ Bourne films, which is high praise considering how those movies used cinéma vérité to embody the modern surveillance state. Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer’s camera work in tandem with Hansjörg Weißbrich’s editing provide a tightly controlled sequence of up-to-the minute decision making, cut hastily but precisely, and aimed at intimate image-making.

It’s a treat to watch, but the only problem is that this scene is about a swimming competition the day before the hostage crisis begins. Nothing in the rest of the film matches this intensity, which is partly owed to the fact that September 5 has an incredibly awkward relationship to time. Where the events of the swim meet unfold over several minutes (condensed to several seconds as the news crew captures personal and national victory), the hostage crisis goes on for a full day. 

However, in capturing its chronology, the film presents little difference between a cut within the same scene and a cut that skips forward several minutes or hours. Unless a character mentions the time on the clock, it’s hard to keep track of how much time has elapsed, or how the situation has evolved.

This is also a function of the movie’s central narrative choice: to practically never leave the newsroom. If their cameras don’t capture it, they don’t see it, which often renders the events themselves a mere background fixture, whose impact never seems to land. No new dimensions are revealed to violence, its causes, or its overarching politics, but the movie also provides little insight into the complications (and royal muck-ups) within the newsroom itself. September 5 runs a hair over 90 minutes, but this time is better spent watching Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary on the same subject, One Day in September, which is made up of archival footage pulled from numerous sources, rather than locking itself to one perspective that isn’t particularly interesting or enlightening to begin with.

September 5 is now in select theaters.

UPDATE: Dec. 12, 2024, 2:39 p.m. EST “September 5” was reviewed out of its 2024 Philadelphia Film Festival premiere. This review, originally published Oct. 29, 2024, has been updated to include the most current viewing information.