September 5 is playing in cinemas nationwide now.
Movies like September 5 leave this critic feeling conflicted. If it were merely a case of measuring a film’s technical abilities, then this review would be much more positive. But how a biopic engages with its chosen historical or political subject matter is as important as the craft surrounding it. The way September 5 tells its story is intriguing, but it gradually begins to feel spiritless.
On September 5th 1972, during the Munich Olympic Games, the Palestinian militant group Black September broke into the Olympic Village and took the Israeli Olympic team hostage in their own apartment. One of the news teams filming the Olympics, the ABC Sports team, are stationed just a few hundred yards away. Given their proximity, network president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decides that they should film the entire ordeal so as to provide live updates on the ongoing crisis for audiences around the world. The film tells its story within the confines of the news station as the situation gradually unfolds into tragedy.
September 5 has a compelling central message regarding the dramatisation of news stories. One of Arledge’s earliest lines proclaims that reporting is not about politics but about emotions. This is a practice that many news or documentary pieces subscribe to – even Planet Earth utilises concepts such as the nuclear family to anthropomorphise the animals it films, thus generating emotional attachment. The ABC team capitalise on the underlying emotions of a given situation to entice viewers into watching. This is easy enough when an Olympic event is inherently about who wins, but the team also takes advantage of historical, societal guilt. In 1972, the painful memories of World War Two and the Holocaust were still relatively fresh, which makes the plight of Jewish athletes on German soil all the more disquieting. The head of the ABC control room, Geoff (John Magaro), recognises this, finding the perfect hook for potential viewers even as some employees question whether they should be filming at all. One can see parallels to Sidney Lumet’s Network or Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler in its exploration of questionable journalistic ethics.
There is a tautness to September 5 that heightens its suspense. By staying within the walls of the news station, the team has to work quickly with scraps of information, relying on improvisation and last-minute judgement calls even as they’re rolling the cameras. This maintains strong momentum, the use of handheld cam, close-ups and archival footage all adding to the crushing pressure of the story. Sharp confrontational dialogue adds to the anxiety, delivered by a range of lionhearted performances. Magaro’s Geoff is particularly opportunistic, while Leonie Benesch (who is brilliant in The Teachers’ Lounge) plays a German translator who seems most acutely aware of how exploitative she and her team are being. From a filmmaking standpoint, there’s much to admire.
However, the film ends up making the exact same mistake as its characters – it reduces its subject matter to something binary for the purpose of easy emotional reactions when the tragedy it depicts was fundamentally complicated. Black September’s actions were objectively heinous, but their motives stemmed from the Israel-Palestine conflict, a dispute that began in 1948 and is still ongoing as of writing. Other than passing mentions of the group being Palestinian and demanding the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners – the number was actually 234 – the film portrays the hostage takers merely as “Arabs”, with the news team labelling them as terrorists, deliberately cherry picking images that reinforce regressive, xenophobic ideas of Palestinians.
Some of this is inherently down to the story’s setting and contemporary attitudes of the time. But by neglecting the elephant in the room that is the Israel-Palestine conflict – by taking out the politics in favour of emotions – the film backstabs its own otherwise thought-provoking themes. The narrative arc stems from the news team realising how their greedy desire to get a scoop is putting people’s lives in danger, which is true. But had the film gone the extra mile and tried to understand why the crisis happened in the first place, thus demonstrating how the conflict isn’t as simple as the team is claiming, the film could’ve further scrutinised its characters and shown the full futility of Arledge’s “no politics only emotion” thinking. Yet September 5 sadly keeps its distance from the political baggage that’s quintessential in showcasing the tragedy of this event. That same refusal to engage with politics, merely portraying the conflict as a binary story of good and bad, is precisely how we ended up with the current political situation surrounding the devastating war between Israel and Palestine that has left so many dead, families torn apart and homes obliterated. The lack of personal consequences for anyone beyond Benesch’s character does the film no favours either.
Upon reflection, I’m reminded of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, which was also about the Munich Massacre and the emotions surrounding it. Munich and September 5 are very different films – one is an espionage thriller and the other a newsroom drama – but Munich genuinely engaged with the intricate politics of the massacre and the wider Israel-Palestine conflict, resulting in a measured even-handed film. Munich, rightfully, never once condoned Black September’s actions, but it also highlighted that the conflict wasn’t black and white – that when people are faced with decades of colonialism from another much more advanced state, a breeding ground for extremism naturally arises. September 5 ignores this vital context in the pursuit of generating knee-jerk emotions, leaving a sense of cheapness, even moral dubiousness, to the final result.
September 5 is a well-crafted film, but by removing the political context of its conflict, it undermines its thematic ambitions and leaves a sour taste, becoming as shamelessly complicit as the media team it’s depicting. There’s a lot to like about the picture; it’s superbly acted by a motley crew of excellent character actors, and its suspenseful technical ability is undeniably nail-biting. But it’s an ultimately cowardly film, one that is likely to age poorly as the full devastation of the most recent Israel-Palestine conflict comes to light.
Follow Us