September 5 (2024)

Rated R and it absolutely didn't need to be rated R.  I mean, there is language in the movie.  That's why it officially is rated R.  But there isn't even that much language.  This was a movie we held off until the kids were in bed for and our oldest absolutely should have been able to watch this.  I mean, sure, she probably wouldn't have had the attention span coupled with the interest to watch a movie about the attacks on the Munich Olympics.  But whatever.  While there is death, it is all off camera.

DIRECTOR: Tim Fehlbaum

And now we're going to have the discussion.  These blogs that I'm writing right now are my least favorite to write.  These are the movies that I couldn't finish writing about before the Academy Awards, despite having watched them before the Oscars were televised.  (Okay, mostly televised.  Hulu decided not to show Best Actress nor Best Picture.)   There is very little drive to get these on the website because that page is now going to be an abandoned mall of information.  We know who got the Academy Award.  We know who didn't.  September 5 did not get the Academy Award.  I'm writing this because I watched it.  If you want an insight into what it is like to maintain a blog where you write about everything you watch, this is one of those moments that is willpower in the face of wanting to take a nap.

My wife kept asking me if I wanted to know how the entire thing ended.  For some reason, I got really defensive at this.  I mean, I have a minor in history.  I had seen Munich when it came out all those years ago. In my head, I remember that there was an attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, but I didn't remember how the whole thing played out --except tragically.  In my head, there was a bomb threat or something.  I don't know.  September 5 is a heck of a way to present this information.  Putting it in the perspective of the sports / news team exclusively gives the the movie a ship-in-a-bottle form of storytelling that is oddly compelling.  The weird thing is that I traditionally don't love these kinds of stories.  I mean, I still hold some grudge against Spotlight for ultimately doing the same thing.  But I don't know if September 5 was necessarily about recounting the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.  

I can't say that the movie isn't about the Palestinian Liberation Army and their attack on Israeli Olympians.  The timing doesn't seem to be an accident.  I want to talk about this a bit in a second (and hopefully will be focused enough to remember that I set this up for discussion later).  But if you take that element of it out (not completely, because the  subject matter is important to the story), it is more of a look at how journalism has a toxic element to it.  The journalists in September 5 are never evil. This isn't a story about media manipulation, nor is it really about propagandizing events for public consumption.  You could make an argument that the journalists in this story are propagandizing the events for consumption with Americans and I probably couldn't fight you very well.  But the point of the story is how seductive the spotlight is.  (Hey, Spotlight!)  

Roone Aldridge, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is the only character who is meant to rub us the wrong way from the beginning.  Aldridge doesn't really hide his ambition from moment one.  There might be a narrative that the character (who was a real dude) tells himself saying that he's doing what has to be done for the better news story.  There's a way to make Aldridge look altruistic.  But the movie is painting the character in a far different way.  Because Aldridge is juxtaposed to many other characters who seem to temper their zeal for media, Aldridge comes across as dangerous.  But we have Aldridge in the movie for a specific reason.  Aldridge's perspective is initially gross with his disregard for safety measures.  But as the film progresses, Aldridge stays static while the other characters start morphing into versions of Aldridge.  Sorry that I struggle with some of the character names, but even Hank Hanson (?), the man who epitomizes the antithesis of Aldridge ends the movie with apologizing to Aldridge despite ultimately being wrong.

The funny thing is that I'm on their side almost immediately.  September 5, whether intentionally or not, is a movie about compartmentalization.  It's not that these reporters don't care about the Olympians.  The movie makes it clear that there is an emotional tie to the people being held hostage.  But these emotions are tainted by success of ABC News.  The reason that these people are thrust into the spotlight is because they are the only ones who can cover this tragedy.   There's a great moment where ABC Sports / News (If you watch it, you know where I'm going with that constant dual naming system) exposes the plan for the police to breach into the Olympic Village to save the hostages.  Now, again, I am on Team News.  As betrayed as I felt during the election cycle with how the news sanewashed Donald Trump, leading to where we are now politically, I also have that narrative that journalism is meant to push back against censorship.  

But that moment where they accidentally tell the kidnappers law enforcement's plan for breaching the Olympic Village, there's a moral grey area there.  Now, the film goes out of its way to stress that a lot of the problems that came out of the Munich Olympics came from the police, who were not trained to handle hostage situations.  That's the film's perspective.  Historians may agree or disagree with that read.  I'm just telling you what the film presents as the reasoning behind why things went so south with the events.  But it doesn't really take the onus off of ABC News.  It's that old Ian Malcolm chestnut, "We were so busy wondering if we couldn't, we never considered if we should." (If I butchered the quote, I don't have the willpower to look it up and slow my momentum.) The movie posits that there is a responsibility to the greater good that stresses that human lives are more important than ratings.  There may not have been a willful desire for hostages to get hurt, but there was also a negligence on the part of ABC to do the right thing.

Now, I just read that the Alamo Drafthouse employees tried to shut down showings of September 5 because of accusations of promoting Zionist ideologies.  The articles I'm reading after (which aren't exactly the most legit sources I've ever looked at) seem dismissive when it comes to the employees' concerns.  While, as a whole, I think there is a place to tell this story, even in today's climate, I can't help but think that the movie had to consider this when making the film. There's a straight up discussion about what to label the members of the PLO.  When the word "terrorist" pops up, there's a discussion showing how the word has political connotation.  But the rest of the movie isn't an attempt to talk about the weight of this word.  Now, my place isn't to come down on this.  But the movie never does present a Palestinian perspective.  But if I'm being honest, it doesn't really go much into the politics of either side beyond the fact that this is a movie about trying to get Olympians free from hostage takers.  Is the film Zionist propaganda?  Probably not.  But it's also not welcoming a deeper discussion beyond what is compelling for a human interest piece.

But if everything is out there and the Oscars are over, what do I think of the movie overall?  The movie is pretty darned good.  But do you know what else?  It's pretty darned forgettable as well.  Part of that comes from the title.  A year from now, I will not know what September 5 will be about.  It's one of those movies that is going to only hold digital real estate on my blog.  If I ever read my own blog, I would be able to remind myself what I thought of it.  But honestly, it's a good movie that never really hits greatness.