The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre famously featured in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), where 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed. The event became a springboard in the Eric Bana-starrer, to showcase Mossad’s efforts for retribution – through a series of assassinations. This was before actors, filmmakers called out Hollywood’s implicit Islamophobia – and the fatigue around the binary depictions of Muslims in mainstream Hollywood as dutiful or barbaric. Relatively speaking, Spielberg’s film was pretty nuanced for its time – even showcasing an argument between Bana and a Muslim character in an apartment, which they’re forced to share at one point. A lot has changed in the last two decades leading up to the release of Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, especially with Hollywood’s apparent ambivalence around Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza, triggered by the October 7 attack carried out by Hamas. As much as Fehlbaum’s film would like to revel in being a single-room thriller and tackle the ethical dilemmas that the ABC team went through while observing the coverage of a tragedy, it’s simply not enough for the macro storytelling elements at play today. A still from ‘September 5’.Fehlbaum’s — which is based on the night of the massacre (the title is derived from Sept 5, 1972 – when it took place) film makes a very deliberate choice to not dwell on the underlying Israel-Palestine conflict. We know this because the film opens with ABC Sport’s president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) passing a sly note to his production crew to cut to the reaction of the German athlete, after his loss to American-Jew swimmer Mark Spitz. He gives directions to the crew to follow this up with a package around the Holocaust, and also doesn’t shy away from exploiting the Cuban-American hostility before a boxing match between athletes of the two nationalities. Which is enough to say that the makers do understand the significance of historical context between the nationalities being presented in the film. There’s a token dialogue to someone making a reckless comment on an ‘Arab’ – to which a crew member takes offence, reminding his colleague that his mother is Algerian. It feels like the film is checking a box, rather than making a sincere assertion. What September 5 does rather well is recreating the smoke-filled, balmy interiors of the ABC control room, whose air-conditioner is broken. So, we have the visuals of sweaty men and women trying to make sense of the seemingly unreal visuals in front of them. Alongside Sarsgaard – one of the most stoic faces in Hollywood – Fehlbaum casts John Magaro and Ben Chaplin in the roles of Geoffrey Mason and Marvin Bader, the men overseeing ABC’s broadcast for Arledge. Fehlbaum’s film seems very much in love with the novelty the crew had to devise to cover the event. The way a crew member uses a forged ID to enter and exit the Olympic village to smuggle tapes in and out of the venue for the broadcast gets some screen time; or the way a graphics producer finds a way to superimpose the ABC logo on the screen, when the channel is forced to share their satellite feed with a rival channel in the midst of an interview; or how crew members speaking through walkie-talkies being held close to a microphone, patched to the anchor – the film seems almost comes close to fetishising the logistical hurdles of the time and the way the crew overcomes them.A still from ‘September 5’.John Magaro seems to have an inherent emotional intelligence in the way he conveys the burden of his actions through body language. Sarsgaard, on the other hand, becomes the face of the ruthless American newsman – who will rationalise exploiting a tragedy as “doing his job”. There’s a particularly smug, repulsive scene towards the end of the film, where he talks about the bonus he might get for the coverage of the tragedy. Fehlbaum grounds his film with a lesson in humility for the American crew and its hero-complex, by showcasing an extended sequence when the crew pronounces all hostages have been freed. There’s a momentary celebration, beers are opened in the control room, there are smiles all around. Until Bader gets confirmation on the death of all Israeli hostages, pulling Arledge and Mason outside – puncturing all the joy in the control room. At one point, their German colleague bemoans how all she did near the airport (where there was gunfire exchange between German police and members of Black September) was stand around, hoping for something to happen, so that she could take a picture of it. September 5 is not a bad film, but it definitely ends up looking myopic and/or obfuscatory – especially given the heightened sensitivity in the conversation around Israel’s repeated military assault in Gaza. The newsroom drama gets trumped up by its optics and timing, by trying to be a cautionary tale on journalism. Frankly, more important things are happening right now. ‘September 5’ was the opening film at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2025.
