September 5 (2024)

September 5 arrives with the sober bearing of a film that knows exactly which tragedy it is standing beside. Tim Fehlbaum parks his camera inside the ABC Sports control room in Munich and refuses to leave, which is a sound decision, because the room is where the story actually lives. Peter Sarsgaard's Roone Arledge sells emotion over politics, John Magaro's Geoffrey Mason forges credentials and hoards a scoop, and the hostage crisis unfolds mostly as audio, rumor, and a bank of monitors. The result is a newsroom procedural with a conscience, and the conscience belongs to Ben Chaplin's Marvin Bader, who keeps reminding everyone that the people on the other end of the feed are dying.

That conscience is the film's nearest approach to sermonizing, and it stays mercifully brief. The screenplay dramatizes its moral instead of announcing it, letting the forged press pass and the premature victory broadcast do the lecturing. Such indictment as exists is aimed at ratings culture and the packaging of atrocity for sweeps, which plays as a media-ethics complaint and not a systemic economic tract. Leonie Benesch's translator is a genuine presence with genuine competence, though the film has no interest in turning her into a statement. The ensemble is mostly white and mostly male because the 1972 ABC Sports crew was mostly white and mostly male, and the few Black crew members go about their business unremarked.

The Israeli and Palestinian dimensions sit where history put them: in the background, as the reason the gunshots happened. No contemporary grievance is retrofitted onto 1972. There is no romantic subplot, no identity arc, no ecological lament, no third-act monologue explaining what we ought to feel. Just a correction read aloud on live television and a bulletin board of photographs. The closing card notes that 900 million people watched. The film seems to believe that number is the horror, and it is right.