Review: September 5

It's impossible to watch a film based on such terrifying real events without reflecting on the state of the world today

Posted by: Matthew Ardill  •  December 5, 2024 @ 9:41am

Filed under: Reviews

There are no spoilers to this film – it's a true story and we know how this ends. On September 5 in 1972 at the 20th Olympic Games, the first games held in Germany since the war ended 27 years earlier, terrorists belonging to Black September abducted eleven Israeli athletes in Olympic Village. The German police botched attempts at negotiation, refused offers of aid, and disastrously failed in rescuing the athletes. At the end of this terrible day David Mark Berger, Ze'ev Friedman, Yossef Romano, Andre Spitzer, Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Gutfreund, Amitzur Shapira, Yakov Springer, Khat Shorr, Mark Slavin, and Eliezer Halfin were dead. These facts are indelible, true, and totally heart breaking.

The film September 5 puts you in the shoes of the ABC sports broadcasters covering the Olympics on a day they thought would be a light one: a boxing match between Cuba and America being the only thing of real interest they expected to cover. As they prepared for the day, they heard shots ring out from the Olympic Village a mere few hundred feet from their studio. This was in a time when video was still uncommon and much was still shot on film, there were no cellphones, and the world wasn't ringed by satellites bouncing signals around the globe. A single satellite shared by the networks was used to broadcast the Olympics and ABC was the only station prepared to broadcast live from the Village.

This is a raw film tied to a current and ongoing conflict and I'm going to try and examine this film in that context. I'll discuss the film and its execution but follow that by looking at the larger context.

We live in a world where we watch war unfold on our phones, the ubiquitous presence of experts in everything who know absolutely nothing shouting one another down, six of them on screen at a time. This film's setting is before the onset of information madness, a more innocent time. The war still raged in Vietnam and was taking a turn for the worse, but the 24-hour news cycle did not yet plague humanity. Journalism was thoughtful and deliberate and at times unafraid to shine a light into the darker places we needed to see, but it was still a world where there was a sense of idealism. People were trying to put these global acts of violence behind them and embrace peace, and at these Games, "the Olympic Spirit".

It's in this context we find our cast portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Cory Johnson, Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun, and Benjamin Walker. Tim Fehlbaum – with the assistance of the casting team of Simone Bär, Nancy Foy, and Lucinda Syson – found a cast who rose to the occasion and delivered thoughtful and believable performances.

Shot almost entirely inside a recreation of the studio used in Munich, recreated from blueprints and photographs, we focus on this crew as they are living through the moment: negotiating to get the satellite time away from the other networks, literally inventing the "Screenbug" that we see in the corner of television today, and soldering a telephone to electronics in order to get coverage from Peter Jennings hiding in an athlete's room. They were able to show that the crew behind the camera of a production are as important if not more so than the talent in front of the camera. Jim McKay, Peter Jennings, and Howard Cosell were able to provide commentary, but it's the techs, the translators, and the line producers who figured out how to get them where they needed to be with the resources they needed to cover this story.

At the same time, this was the start of the end of innocence and captured that moment broadcasting live the ominous ski-masked figure posing for the cameras on a balcony. This was the inception of modern television and the film captured the struggle and responsibility of the journalists and their crew doing their best to bring the truth to the public and learning the cost that may have.

The atmosphere is tense, my stomach spending most of the film in knots as we follow the cast through the day, their struggle to capture the event punctuated by the obvious feelings they had on the subject being fresh survivors of a war. The genocide of the Jewish people was at the top of their mind, coupled with their inability to act on these feelings. Expertly cut between archival footage caught during the actual event, set in a period-perfect replica, it felt like we were there back in 1972. Fehlbaum and his crew sifted through thousands of hours of archival footage and strived to perfectly replicate that moment, and for those of us not yet born, helped us feel the pain of being there.

What makes September 5 so painful to watch is the context of the contemporary world. Thoughtful reporting has disappeared in favour of 24-hour news cycles, propaganda, and constant noise from online "journalists", both professional and citizen. One of the more powerful moments was Jennings insisting they be careful how they refer to the group committing the act, the use of the word "terrorist" being something that had to be considered not for fear of offending but for fear of giving power to a group committing a heinous act. At the same time, the producers tried to figure out how to handle the situation should there be violence on camera and where to draw the line. Now, we would simply see murder played out on television, words would be bandied about regardless of context, and thought is a thing of the past in the news cycle.

We live in a world where we are still impacted not just by these events but the events going on in Vietnam while this film was set, the conflict in the Middle East at that time, the war in Korea before that, and all the way back to the Second World War where Hitler and his forces of evil committed acts of genocide, murdering approximately 6 million Jewish people over the course of the war. Meanwhile, colonial powers in the Americas and Europe turned away refugees – let's remember the quote uttered by a Canadian politician in regards to Jewish refugees: "none is too many". These same colonial powers, in a fit of guilt and a fit of pique divided up their empires, walking away from areas and redrawing borders for vast swaths of land willy nilly, creating a home for these refugees with the founding of the nation of Israel. But that didn't end the meddling of these international powers, as proxy wars were fueled and nations were played against other nations like chess pieces moved across a board painted in blood. Peace was not on the table – solidifying access to resources and radicalizing people was the objective of one group while another group was fueled by hate, anger, and a desire for vengeance. It's easy to point a finger at one party or another. Right now we have wars playing out again in the Middle East and Europe, and once again Canada and other colonial powers turn away refugees.

The only constant between September 1, 1939 and now is innocent people are dying as society passively stares on, fretting but doing nothing. The post-Cold War integrum of peace in the 90s was shattered by one of the most prolonged periods of war in human history, all on the backs of the deaths of innocents, genocides justified by those in power, and the cycle of violence brought to us 24/7 streaming to a device near you.

It's important to remember how we got here. I've had the privilege of meeting people who survived acts of genocide. We casually forget acts because they sit almost 100 years in our past or fifty years in our past or a year ago on the other side of an ocean. We have politicians who toss us bread with blood-stained hands, and whose proxies put on circuses buddying up to strong men to keep economies in motion. We have "truth tellers" whose claims to fame are they were on a show with Andy Dick or they used to work for a hipster magazine out of Toronto before going on YouTube and getting paid by Russia to spread nonsense. Films like this remind us the power of cinema, they remind us the world deserves better, and they remind us that the victims of these acts of genocide and acts of terror deserve better.

Tags: John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leoni Benesch, September 5, Peter Sarsgaard, Paramount Pictures

Related Posts

• Review: Novocaine
• Review: Gladiator II
• Review: A Quiet Place: Day One
• Paranormal Activity 3: Tweet to decide who sees it first!
• Review: Green Lantern