Even though the Oscars ceremony was held earlier this evening, there are still a few stragglers left from the Oscars Death March so what better time to catch up with the last Best Original Screenplay nominee I hadn't seen, for a movie I'd never even heard of before the nominees were announced: September 5, a docudrama about the day Palestinian terrorists attacked the 1972 Munich Olympic Village, killing and taking hostage members of the Israeli team, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 11 athletes.
Beginning in the wee hours of the morning, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro, Silvio Dante in The Many Saints of Newark), the head of the control room is supervising maintenance while the top brass and talent go to rest. After a while, gunshots are heard from the nearby Village. When they realize there may be a hostage situation, they recall the crews to cover it and violate the no calls edict from ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, Green Lantern) to bring him and head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin, The Thin Red Line) back to work. Their translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), is the glue holding the operation together as she monitors the police radio and German media.
What follows is a fascinating look at the challenges of covering a rapidly changing situation with technology that is positively primitive by modern standards. Whereas everyone can now livestream from their phones to the Internet, in 1972 the revolutionary new mobile cameras required massive transmitter backpacks and only had wide-angle lenses meaning that they had to push a massive studio camera outside in order to be able to zoom in on the housing unit where the attack was occurring which was near the broadcast studio.
Arledge had to negotiate with other networks to have their slots on the satellite. To superimpose text on a screen required sticking letters on a black board and shooting it with a camera. 16mm film requiring development and editing on flatbed editors like a movie meaning it could be a half-hour before anything gets on the air. Engineers soldering leads to a telephone in order to get audio into the mixer for broadcast.
Then there are the ethical conundrums - poncy reporter Peter Jennings (who'd later become the anchor of ABC News) worried that calling the terrorists "terrorists" would be unfair to their feelings (so the media has been garbage for a looooooooong time) - and the realization that the bad guys were watching the coverage and learning what the cops were planning to do. The fog of war and balancing whether to be right or to be first in reporting comes into play at the climax. There is even a telling detail involving forging an ID to get a courier into the Village which silently exposes how lax security was.
There used to be a time when movies about Heroic Journalists Bringing The Facts To The People were commonplace from All The President's Men (which is a lie because Woodward & Bernstein were basically handed the story by disgruntled FBI official Mark Felt - bka "Deep Throat" - out of a vendetta against Nixon) to the 2016 Best Picture Oscar-winning Spotlight, but as media became corrupted and politicized to the point where they became overt apparatchiks and propagandists to the Democrat Party, they have vaporized their credibility to the point where it's a safe bet to presume they're lying to us and a movie portraying them as heroes would be laughed off the screen.
This is why September 5 is kind of a unicorn in that it doesn't valorize these men as journalists per se, but portrays them as just hard-working professionals trying to get the facts out under extraordinary circumstances. Was Arledge hanging onto the story under ABC Sports purview rather than allow ABC News to take over for personal reasons? Probably, but he also knew that he could cover things better right there than reporters based in New York.
When compared to the other four Best Original Screenplay nominees, the work of director Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David stands out by not having massive issues with the script. They trust the audience to keep up with what's happening and not needing it spoonfed to them by Basil Exposition. We don't get much of a sense of what everyone's lives are like outside of working at the Olympics and that's a good thing because the story here is the story of Munich and terror and trying to inform the audience.
I would probably have never watched September 5 if it hadn't been nominated and I endeavored to see all the nominees, but I'm glad the writer's branch bothered to nominate ONE script which wasn't a Swiss cheese of plot holes, weak characters, and muddled theses. I didn't want to vote for any other the other four options; I would've voted for this. And it's over two hours shorter than The Brutalist, so definitely cherkitert.
Paramount+ presents it in 4K Dolby Vision and if I hadn't checked I would've have known it was HDR because the gritty, period documentary-style cinematography doesn't look slick and shiny. There's nothing wrong with that, just that if you don't have a high-end TV or just want the Blu-ray, you're sacrificing nothing.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+.)
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