‘September 5’ Review: When the Munich Games Changed Our News

A tense ethical showdown with the racing pulse of a thriller, “September 5” revisits the day in 1972 when the Munich Olympics became a very different kind of international spectacle. Before dawn that morning, while many of the world’s elite athletes were still sleeping in the Olympic Village or drunkenly heading for bed, eight heavily armed members of Black September, a militant Palestinian group, easily scrambled over a perimeter fence in the village. They quickly made their way to the building where the Israeli delegation was housed and took 11 of its members hostage, shooting two men, who soon died.

This grim flashpoint sets “September 5” in motion, but the movie isn’t about the hostages, the militants or the Middle East. It’s a journalism creation story about the men and a few women from ABC Sports who — originally in Munich to report on fencing, boxing and other athletic competitions — ended up abruptly making history themselves when they covered a major news story globally on live television. The correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), for one, who had established the network’s first Middle East bureau, may have thought he would be enjoying a break by covering the Olympics. He was soon huddling on a balcony, bringing a conflict from the region into homes worldwide while coolly reassuring colleagues, in a mic-drop bit of dialogue, that he’s safely out of range of an exploding grenade.

Jennings and the other boldfaced-journalism names hover in and around “September 5,” which centers on a handful of behind-the-scenes ABC employees, including an earnest young producer, Geoff (John Magaro). Along with a German translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), and a French-Algerian engineer, Jacques (Zinedine Soualem), Geoff is among the first in the group to hear the gunfire that breaks the early quiet. He rouses Roone Arledge, who had brought the Olympics to the network and was the president of ABC Sports. Arledge went on to become the president and chairman of ABC News, superstar status that might explain the flattering decision to cast the camera-friendly Peter Sarsgaard in the role.

It takes a few beats for Geoff and the rest of the crew to grasp the magnitude of what’s happening nearby, but once they do, they step on the gas and just go, go, go. Setting an accelerated pace that rarely eases, the director Tim Fehlbaum, who wrote the script with Moritz Binder (Alex David is billed as a co-writer), smartly skips over the usual people-and-places introductions and the throat-clearing rest. Instead, he stirs up a whirlwind of frenetic motion, homing in on the ABC team, and tries to figure out what they’re actually covering. The network’s main face for the games, Jim McKay — who’s seen only in smoothly incorporated archival footage — was meant to have the day off. He was soon in his studio chair earpiece in place, anchoring and delivering updates live on camera.

Fehlbaum leans heavily into the logistics of getting the crisis on the air, a focus on the labor and the deadline-fueled energy, which gives the movie the quality of a journalism procedural. People race down halls, burst into rooms, fire up monitors, grab rotary phones and bark into walkie-talkies as big as cinder blocks. (The movie is an analog fetishist’s delight.) Amid the kinetic motion, staffers like Marvin (a very good Ben Chaplin) clench jaws to discuss next moves, telegraphing the tough arguments to come. Among the movie’s stealthiest surprises is that each moving part, every rushed phone call and snap decision, is part of a feature-length argument that the filmmakers are making about journalism in the age of mass spectacle.