September 5 **** (2024, Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch) – Classic Movie Review 13,396

The 2024 historical drama film September 5 chronicles the Munich massacre of 1972 from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew. It stars Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch.

Director Tim Fehlbaum’s 2024 historical drama film September 5 stars Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch. It focuses entirely on an American ABC sports broadcasting team forced to try to adapt to live coverage of the Israeli athletes being held hostage by a terrorist group right close to them during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany.

Director Tim Fehlbaum’s 2024 historical drama film September 5 is uber tense, credible and claustrophobic, as well as informative, thought provoking and entertaining, though its purpose is unclear, or maybe subtle, so viewers can make up their own minds about the various issues. There are no lectures here, the issues are all carefully, succinctly and briskly raised, and messages are left entirely to the audience to pick up.

The story is well known, both historically and on film, so there are no surprises there. None of all the Americans are able to speak or understand German, so a German woman can take over, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch). She is non-Jewish, which is a kind of issue, and a mere woman, definitely an underling, redeemed by her usefulness. She’s one of only two women on the scene, the other building the on-screen captions with plastic letters! But this isn’t really about her being a woman. It’s about her being a German, and about her being uniquely useful to the kind of simple-minded Americans.

The acting is high quality realistic, everybody arguing without rancour, staying as a team. The era is well realised, with the archival footage cleverly edited in to the new filming, and all the now risibly primitive, then ground-breaking TV stuff of paraphernalia and equipment, on show. It all looks like something out of the Ark.

Shockingly, the Germans are shown as being completely taken by surprise by the terror situation, not having taken the most basic reasonable security precautions, and now incapable of controlling it, and trying to paper the situation with PR, while the American newsroom is shown struggling with its professionalism and ethics, and also found wanting.

Peter Sarsgaard is excellent as the sports broadcasting team boss, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, totally in command but without a smidgeon of charisma or empathy. His character is a bit of a media monster, but he is the right monster, in the right place at the right time. John Magaro is also very good as the man on the desk controls, Geoffrey Mason, the head of the control room in Munich. Ben Chaplin has two or three strong scenes as Marvin Bader, the head of operation at ABC Sports. Leonie Benesch is brisk and efficient as Marianne Gebhardt, the translator for the crew who speaks German and Hebrew.

The film is nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The writers to commend are Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and Alex David. It is a sizzling screenplay, thanks to Fehlbaum spending months researching the events. Nevertheless, the film gets a lot of its power through using much footage from ABC’s coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics and the hostage crisis.

The American newsroom is one of the stars of the movie, after Fehlbaum worked with a production designers to create an authentic replica of the broadcasting facility used by ABC Sports on the fatal day of the title. It not often we want to applaud the set, but here we certainly do.

We are told at the end that it was the first time a terror attack was broadcast on live television. It was viewed by 900 million people, and one of the most viewed broadcasts in history. Again, no comment or value judgement is put on this. It is what it is.

So the sportsnewsmen were doing that thing that they do, reporting, and doing it to their professional darndest, but why, oh why, do we have to see live disasters played out on TV for our entertainment? That is the main question, and there is no answer, and the relevance of this TV event is that it seriously promoted the media Circus Maximus to the max for all time to come. It was all in the worst possible taste. The media played into the hands of the terrorists, and had little concern about the victims or the families back home watching agonisingly on TV.

So maybe the film’s purpose is clear after all. Time to put thinking caps on.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,396

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