by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch
Intro:
… gripping viewing …
Despite being about events which occurred in 1972, this film is topically relevant — or at least resonant — right now. The locale is Munich, and an ABC (American) TV sports unit is covering the first Olympic games to be broadcast live around the world. Suddenly, everything changes, when a number of Israeli athletes are taken hostage by Palestinian militants from the Black September group. “It’s not about politics, it’s about emotions”, says one of the ABC crew. It’s a moot point, to put it mildly, but the absence of a wider perspective is inevitable given that the story here is essentially about their professional response to the unfolding drama.
What follows is very naturalistic, and also claustrophobic: the whole thing is pretty much set inside the sports unit’s control room. They insist on covering the potentially nightmarish situation themselves, on the not unreasonable grounds that they are a matter of yards away from the action while the ABC news crew is “halfway around the world”. Meanwhile, 900 million people are watching.
Black September announce that they will shoot a hostage an hour if two hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israel are not released. Quite apart from the obvious intensity on all sides, September 5 is really interesting on a purely logistical level — not least in its meticulously realistic depiction of the technical challenges and pressures that the TV crew would have faced back then.
If you don’t know what eventually happened, you’ll find the tension and suspense here extreme. But even if you do, this is gripping viewing and excellent all round in its unavoidably limited way.
Recommended.