September 5

Swiss writer/producer/director Tim Fehlbaum tells the story of the ABC Television Sports crew who wound up broadcasting live coverage of the Munich massacre terrorist attack that occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in West Germany. Their coverage of the events was the first worldwide live TV broadcast of a large-scale news event as it unfolded. A solid cast recreates these historical events from the perspective of the team, mostly inside the TV control room located in the Olympic Village. Peter Sarsgaard plays Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports; Ben Chaplin plays Marvin Bader, the head of ABC Sports operations; John Magaro plays Geoffrey Mason, the director of the control room in Munich; and Benjamin Walker plays Peter Jennings, who reported live from the apartment complex where the Palestinian militant organization Black September took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage demanding the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israel. Since none of these guys are actual hard new journalists, and most don't speak English, they rely heavily on a local translator who speaks German and Hebrew, Marianne Gebhardt (played rivetingly by The Teachers' Lounge star Leonie Benesch).

Fehlbaum and co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David spend a fair amount of time wrestling with age-old questions about the role of television journalism in covering acts of terror as if they were a ratings-driven TV show, thankfully without pretentious on-the-nose Sorkenesque dialogue. But they don't find a way to place the events this team is covering into the full historical context, like Steven Spielberg's excellent 2005 thriller Munich does. What we get here mostly explores how those who write not only the first draft of history but the rough draft of history can affect the course of the events they cover. The film is less concerned with the fact that the live, 24/7 breaking-news cycle that must be filled with wild speculation and opportunistic commentary that this event directly birthed, more often than not, results in spreading disastrously incorrect information that sometimes lasts in the public consciousness far more than the actual facts. Fictionalized movies made fifty years after the fact should better explore the historical events they dramatize from all angles.

September 5 unfolds over a tight, exciting 94 minutes. But with a slightly longer running time, I think this film could have been just as compelling but gone deeper into the themes it covers and spent a little more time investigating the motifs of the hostage takers. The narrative conceit these filmmakers devise feels like an easy way to avoid doing just that, but great screenwriters could have found a way within these dramatic parameters.