On the Clock
It is an unusual thing for Hollywood to walk back across the ground that Steven hath trod. Whole subjects become untouchable once Spielberg folds up his director’s chair. The era of truly epic shark films began and ended with Jaws. No more boulders will roll at fedora-sporting archeologists unless he sets them back in motion. Bicycles are no longer for aliens, and the hallowed beaches of Normandy will forever be his exclusive domain.
September 5 steps squarely on the patch of Earth that, nearly two decades ago, the great and powerful Spielberg claimed as his own in Munich, the wrought and suspenseful thriller about the events after the murder of twelve Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Summer Olympics. Munich always seemed to doubt itself, noncommittal about the melding of tale about political assassination with a story of family, and doubt. From the opening scene, in that grand Hollywood tradition of rolling old newsreels across new film, September 5 leaps without hesitation into the self-confident telling of a boring story made riveting by the brilliance of its production.
September 5 is a film obsessed with the timepiece. A wristwatch appears in one frame after another – heavy on a male wrist, thin and delicate on a woman’s, this one curled over with arm hair, that one lingered upon by the camera, now a stopwatch poised before a swimming race, the hands ticking ominously. Each weighs heavily upon the truism of a movie with the ending already spoiled by fact; that time is running out, for the hostages, for those who wish to save them, and for the men and women tasked with broadcasting to the world the ugly truth of terrorists unleashed.
It's in the opening scene that Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum so deftly strikes the tone of discomfort. A sports station on site to cover the fabricated drama of athletic competition suddenly tasked with investigating and amplifying the ski mask-hidden actions of humans-turned-monsters. The sing-songy midcentury toothpaste commercial music and lighthearted timbre of the announcer, cheerfully inviting the viewer at home to join in the fun, strikes a sickening note right away. The first Israeli flag is shown only seconds in. We all know how this ends, with gunshots and failure and widows and fatherless children. Fehlbaum’s brilliance is in walking us there from behind the cameras of ABC Sports.
Pulling off the procedural newsroom drama is no simple task. Ultimately, even on the set of the most riveting news moment, the plotline is a sequence of stutter stepping decisions based more on business than artistic preference. How to move a camera into position. Who to quote, who to cut, what source materials can be compared with what teleprompter script to sell the story to the audience in a way that upholds the impeccable moralistic standards of an industry now fallen while not underselling the tawdriness of television? The German translator Marianne, played by Leonie Benesch, becomes the means by which September 5 marches forward in stylistic flourish. Time and time again she straddles the obligation of the German generation after the Nazis, speaking out loud the unspeakable wishes of a country desperate to forget. Of a country compelled to remember. She translates the police scanner in real time, guiding with increasing firmness the square-shouldered American newsmen, stating with quiet clarity the facts as they unfold – the police are amateurs, the scene is chaos, the hostages and the terrorist are all dead. She holds up producer Geoffrey Mason, played by John Magaro, when he sags in the face of the awesome responsibility thrust upon him. Her soft unblinking eyes remind him, remind them all, that the past has not yet ended, that men are once again taking the Jews out of Munich.
That question of responsibility is itself the great climax of the film. Not the shootout with the terrorists, but the conundrum of what to show, and when. First, the crew realizes with sickening clarity that their own ABC broadcast is being watched by the men in masks, black-and-white sets flickering in the hotel rooms and giving away, in real time, the plans of the police. Then, a greater reality settles upon them all. Can they broadcast the execution of hostages on live television? Should they? Peter Sarsgaard, playing ABC Sports legend Roone Arledge, contemplates it all in the backroom. Who benefits from the propaganda, and can they grapple with the questions quickly enough not to lose the shot, the moment, the chance to make broadcast history and one-up CBS, and perhaps save a few lives, in the process?
In a turn of sickening coincidence, September 5 was released widely on January 17, 2025, two days after an agreement was reached to pause the war between Israel and Hamas and begin the return of the hostages held for more than 450 days by Palestinian terrorists in the tunnels beneath Gaza. The balaclavas have not changed. They remain in use, to hide the identities of murderers waving Kalashnikovs in the faces of innocents, just as they did on September 5, 1972. And if the terrorists of today learned anything from their predecessors, it was that no press is bad press. The atrocities of October 7 were broadcast live in a savage act of psychological warfare, just as the release of the Israeli hostages in the past few weeks has been posted instantly to social media, the faces of a publicity-addicted lynch mob covered in the style of Black September.
To watch this movie, at this moment, is to become a willing participant in the use of mass media to spread mass fear, to send a message that no one is safe. Geoffrey Mason made that choice from behind the camera in Munich. He and Roone Arledge decided not just to tell everyone, but to show everyone, what these agents of fear were capable of. “More people watched our broadcast today than watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon,” Rutledge declares in beer soaked, self-congratulatory delight, wrongly believing that the crisis had ended, and the Israelis had been freed.
The closing scene lets us watch as Magaro turns off the lights in the control room, a fitting end to a procedural, understated and elegant. He stands in the dark, contemplating the silenced bank of monitors, considering the work of tomorrow, another live broadcast, this one of the commemoration for the Israeli lives lost. The room is black, except for two clocks still illuminated on the wall. Both still ticking.
Sam Jefferies has written one book, the true story of Nashville's only homegrown hockey hero, and won no awards. He appreciates a good pair of suspenders.
