September 5, review: The Oscar-nominated drama of the Munich Olympic Games is the wrong film for the moment

When it comes to art, the word “apolitical” largely serves as a kind of great deception. You cannot simply shake the meaning and implication from words and pictures as if you were a dusty, old carpet. And either, people like a button on a machine cannot easily switch off morality and emotions, consciously or subconsciously.

Such concepts have an impact September 5th (Extreme “Five)), Tim Fehlbaum’s film about the 1972 Olympic Games, in which eight armed men from the Palestinian militia -black September killed two members of the Israeli team and took another nine members as hostages. In a failed attempt at rescue, all nine athletes were killed together with five of the eight black September members and a West German police officer. It is a moment that was previously launched in worthwhile cinema: the consequences were well covered by Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), whose script, which was written by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, showed far more interest in dealing with the moral and emotional foundations of Israeli and Palestinian violence.

September 5th pursues a comparatively sloping approach and focuses on the live TV reporting on ABC Sports about the event. It spoils the idea that everything that is really important is to tell stories, with any risk or cost – and in the same time take an attitude of intentional ignorance in terms of historical context and journalistic ethics. The last beat and the explanation of the concrete performance occur when ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) tells us that more people have observed their reporting than at the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

Instead of politics, we serve borderline fetishistic pictures of chain smokers in shirts and tie plus a woman who employs fictional German translators Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) deep into the work of problem solving. It is almost exclusively located in the studio, highly and impressively illuminated by cameraman Markus supporter to look like the ideas laboratory of a crazy scientist. Every centimeter of the screen is packed with retirement, bulky cameras, thick cables, sweaty brows and rolled up sleeves. It is about journalism as a hard, robust work that are recorded in close -ups. Actors provide every line with a certain practiced bravery, the furrow and hands on the hips. The Oscar nomination for the best original script is largely based on the ability to deliver proper, small quips (“These police officers have no idea what they do”; “No wonder they have lost war”).

From the moment when the ABC crew hears shots for the first time, Fehlbaum’s film becomes a single, steady drip feed from adrenaline. Could one of these heavy television cameras be rolled outside and up the view of the hotel room of the Israeli team? Could one of the news crew (Daniel Adeosun) be glued to his body as a US athlete with a fake ID and film canisters to sneak past the Kordon? If the German media announce a development, do you really need a second confirmation?

At the head of these decisions is Geoffrey Mason, head of the Munich control area. He is played by First cowJohn Magaro, an actor with a violent, natural intelligence for him, who can directly express the audience that his actions have a weight and will breed their own consequences. But Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder and Alex David’s script deal with the entire context of the history of Israel and Palestine or the political tensions that already hang over the 1972 games as a background noise. Here or there there is a line about how the lack of security of West Germany at the event was shaped by the wish to create a distance between the present and the country’s Nazis. There is a moment when a French-algery member of the team (Zinedine Soualem) stands against an anti-Arab comment. The team’s only expert in the Middle East, Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), is led from the screen with a single warning: “We have to be very sensitive about what we say.”

In every context, it reveals a lack of curiosity. But now it was considered that hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians return to their homes in Gaza in order to reduce them to rubble, while so much of the media world is rejecting themselves – well, it is upset. The idea that there is a film like September 5th Telling his story through an apolitical lens is not only wrong: it is ridiculous.

You: Tim Fehlbaum. Actor: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem. Cert 15, 94 minutes.

September 5 will be in cinemas from February 7th