September 5 Captures a Crisis Becoming Must-Watch TV

In the film September 5, the ABC Sports studio at the 1972 Munich Olympics seems like an uncomfortable space in which to work, let alone think. The control room is smoky, the air conditioner barely functions, and every piece of machinery generates a frustrating amount of background noise. Yet the producers and reporters inside are more than capable of focusing on their jobs as they put together engaging, daily live broadcasts of the Games.

That changes when a militant Palestinian group sneaks into the Olympic Village and takes members of the Israeli team hostage one morning. But unlike other films that have examined the incident, such as Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated Munich, September 5 holds the sprawling political implications of the attack itself at a distance; it’s a taut thriller that concentrates solely on how the ABC Sports team pivoted to crisis coverage. Given the demands of live television, the journalists had only moments to confront ethical questions as they tried to stay on the air. What happened in the crew’s cramped quarters on September 5, 1972, the movie argues, blurred the line between delivering journalism and creating spectacle—even as the team’s work made history by keeping 900 million viewers glued to their television sets.

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, September 5, now in theaters, frequently drops the audience into the middle of the action via walks and talks, heated phone calls, and even archival footage from the actual broadcast. The addition of such real-life clips—including that of the anchor Jim McKay—gives September 5 a documentary-like feel, cleverly immersing viewers into the uneasy headspace of those inside the studio. The hostage crisis is unfolding just 100 yards away from them, but most of the employees watch the events as they’re filtered through a camera lens. Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro), the eager and anxious young producer leading the newsroom that day, is practically trapped in the control room.

Then again, that’s where he can best see the time; it is, in other words, where he wants to be. Time, not the hostage crisis, drives the film’s action: Verbal countdowns punctuate the dialogue; large, glowing analog clocks loom over the control-room monitors; and a crucial scene involves Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of ABC Sports, aggressively negotiating with another network executive for more broadcasting slots with the live satellite. Time—and the limited quantity of it available—also tends to prevent the team from doing its best work. When Geoffrey, Roone, and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a veteran producer, begin debating whether they should be pointing cameras at where the hostages might emerge—what if one of them is killed on live TV?—they’re told by other staffers that they have only two minutes to decide. When Geoffrey sees that a German outlet is interviewing a released hostage nearby, he sends staffers to whisk the man into the ABC studio as soon as possible. He can’t give more thought to the subject’s well-being, because he can’t waste the limited programming opportunities they have.

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That tension between empathy and urgency is the key to September 5’s success. At a lean 94-minute length, the film mostly moves at a brisk pace, matching its characters’ feelings of stress. Yet Fehlbaum also slows the momentum in some scenes to show how the station’s crew members operate equipment: Captions are spelled out by hand. Developing a larger version of a photo takes several minutes inside a darkroom. To make footage play in slow motion, a technician gently rotates a roll of tape at a precise speed.

Such intimate moments emphasize the contrast between the typical patience inside the studio and the frenzy the team succumbs to when news breaks. The pressure to get ahead of other networks—via more updates, more sound bites, more footage, more everything—takes over. Staffers such as the station’s German translator, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), and the correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) resemble storm chasers as they charge to the front lines with camera crews in tow. The producers don’t stop to consider whether broadcasting the locations of the German police officers might affect any rescue attempts. When onlookers later swarm the militants and the hostages as they finally leave the building, the footage looks surreal—those involved in the attack have become celebrities, surrounded by cameras, hounded by crews seeking the grabbiest story rather than the sharpest one. The ABC team caves to those impulses, too, rushing the confirmation of a tip that eventually proves devastatingly inaccurate.

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September 5’s storytelling can occasionally become heavy-handed, with pat dialogue (“It’s not about politics; it’s about emotions,” Roone argues) and claustrophobia-inducing production design. But its unwavering focus on ABC’s small studio in Munich underlines how the journalists inside drifted toward sensational coverage. By every quantifiable metric—viewership, satellite time, other outlets citing ABC’s reporting first—they were doing their jobs well.

It’s hard to see the film’s depiction of that day and not also think about how fraught the expectations for live coverage are, for both its creators and its consumers—the predilection for drama over fact, the frequent prioritization of expedience over quality. When the movie has its characters repeatedly raise concerns over what to air, their criticisms echo long-standing questions in journalism, including how to reconcile the need for an audience with a story’s actual importance. September 5 is effective because it doesn’t claim to say anything original about the perils of reporting and consuming breaking news. It’s simply—and bluntly—showing how easily those familiar perils can be overlooked.