September 5 review - gripping real-life thriller

There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.

September 5 encapsulates all of that, bar the virtue perhaps, and with the concrete deadline replaced by another practical pressure – of live broadcast – and the ethical decisions that arise when the story in front of the camera is literally one of life or death. 

Tim Fehlbaum’s film is based on the terrorist attack on the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, in which members of the militant Palestinian group Black September held Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic village for close to 24 hours, before a tragic denouement. Rather than the kidnappers, victims, or the authorities trying to free them, Fehlbaum’s focus is on the ABC sports broadcasters who turned their cameras from the games towards the chilling news story that was unfolding.This was the first time a terrorist incident had been followed on a live broadcast, reaching a staggering 900 million people, and with some very unexpected complications.

With Fehlbaum confining his action almost entirely to the on-site TV studio, and intermingling his fictional scenes with a wealth of archive footage, the result is a fascinating, gripping, claustrophobic media procedural, which is so tense – despite our knowing the outcome – that it plays almost as a fictional thriller. In that sense, it recalls, broadly, one of the great films of the Seventies, All The President’s Men. It leaves much to mull over, ethically and philosophically, about the role and responsibility of the media – and, these days, anyone with a smartphone – in covering news events. It opens with the calm before the storm, and the night-time change of shift at the ABC sports studio in Munich, just over a hill from the Olympic village. Young producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) begins his preparations for the next day’s sporting events, alongside a skeleton crew. It’s quiet, dim, business-like, with a sense of the ‘B-team’ holding the fort while the big guns are getting some shuteye. Then, there’s a crack across the night sky, which could be gunshots. 

Hereon, Fehlbaum, co-writer Moritz Binder and the cast skilfully convey the quickly growing realisation within the studio of what is transpiring just a few hundred yards away, and the team’s speedy response. Returning to the studio, ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, (pictured above) insists that his team keep hold of this extraordinary story – since it’s they who have the cameras and the personnel in place – rather than hand it over to the news team. While Arledge moves the big pieces in the background, including bartering for coveted satellite spots with his rivals, Mason orchestrates the coverage itself. 

And the latter involves a huge amount of improvisation, whether it’s sending a huge studio camera into the open air and an exterior vantage, or smuggling canisters of 16mm film into the now heavily policed Olympic village to the reporters who have positioned themselves inside, or hacking the German police communications to keep abreast of the largely clueless attempt to deal with the terrorists. 

The studio and its analogue equipment are brilliantly recreated, allowing for an enjoyably intricate depiction of how it would have been done at the time, from captions being handmade and photographed, to slow-motion effects, again by hand, as well as the purely journalistic skillset that enables Mason and his colleagues to maintain 22 hours of live coverage on the air. 

The film has a grainy, Seventies feel to it, while the incorporation of archive newsreel is seamless and intelligent – when we see into the village and the hostage situation, it is almost always through the original images that were captured by the ABC journalists; while, the best touch of all, sports anchor man Jim McKay is not played by an actor but is the man himself, as seen, so memorably and movingly, in 1972. 

It's evident, then, that the ingenuity of the ABC sports team is both reflected and emulated by the filmmakers, while the whole has a short and sharp, no-nonsense air of which old-school journalists would approve.

This approach may frustrate some who would expect the script to dwell longer on the ethical questions it raises; but it raises them nonetheless, naturally, as part of the nail-biting action: the realisation by the studio team that, if events head south, they may end up showing a murder, live on screen; the revelation that the images they're so pleased of capturing, which include policemen closing in on the hostage apartments, are being watched on TV by the terrorists themselves – making the newsmen complicit in their decisions; the fateful choice of whether to rush to air with the first reports of the final shootout, ahead of the competition, or wait for confirmation.

The ensemble cast is excellent. Magaro, a delightful mainstay of independent cinema (First Cow, Past Lives), is his usual, no frills, naturalistic self, convincing as a young journalist determined to make the most of this sudden opportunity, gaining in confidence as the night progresses, only for his inexperience and pressure from above to lead to a major misjudgement. 

The ever-brilliant Sarsgaard gives a glimpse of what made Arledge a legend in sports coverage, as well as the ego and ambition that impede journalistic integrity; the only problem with his performance is that we don’t get enough of it. Ben Chaplin (pictured above, centre, with Sarsgaard and Magaro) similarly makes the most of too few scenes, as ABC head of operations Marvin Bader, Mason’s mentor and the moral counterweight to Arledge. More integral is German actress Leonie Benesch (The Teachers Lounge, pictured above) as a fictional character, translator Marianne Gebhardt, who represents both the new generation of Germans eager to lift their country from its dark past and reputation, and an outsider’s view of the journalists in action – though as the events unfold, she finds herself increasing engaged in their endeavour. While the journalists at times get over-excited by their running scoop, Marianne offers a stabilising sense of reality. 

The September 5 events have been covered on film before, most memorably in Kevin Macdonald’s Osar-winning documentary One Day in September and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, a fictionalised account of Israel’s retribution. Fehlbaum’s film may coincide with the current tensions in the Middle East, but it resonates more as a provocative reminder of the responsibility and consequences every time we point a camera, or turn on a mic.

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