• September 5

3/11/25 (Tues)

A riveting backstage story about the ABC Sports crew members at the 1972 Munich Olympics, who, expecting a sleepy night setting up for the next day’s games, find themselves instead covering a life-or-death news story when the Black September terrorist group takes Israeli athletes hostage. Events start slowly, but as soon as a staff member hears what appear to be gunshots from the direction of the Olympic village, the story takes off with a momentum that never lets up.

ABC wants to hand responsibility to the news division in the US, but Roone Arledge, the head of the sports operations, resolutely refuses, noting that his team is just 100 yards from where the events are unfolding (“News can tell us what it all meant after it’s over… But this is our story, and we’re keeping it”). Geoffrey Mason improvises as best he can to get the story out in the face of growing competition from other broadcasters: he has the crew drag a large camera outside where it can see the village, deals with CBS over satellite allocations, reacts quickly to sporadic news with the invaluable help of the interpreter. The sports team hacks into police communications, disguises a newsman as an athlete to sneak him into the locked-down athletes village, plasters its logo on their feed so that the ABC mark will show even when CBS broadcasts it. Cooler heads try to prevent them from prematurely calling the killers “terrorists” (which was fortunately ignored) and reporting key news until confirmed by at least two sources.

This leads to several moral conflicts of interest. The ABC team ponders whether the publicity is just what the terrorists are seeking (“Whose story is it? Is it ours, or is it theirs?”). It broadcasts the police scaling the roof for a rescue operation, only to realize in horror that the terrorists could be watching as well. Did the story itself actually doom the attempted rescue? In an eagerness not to be scooped, it announces unconfirmed rumors that the athletes were saved, only to backtrack in humiliation when the truth is known. The crew try their best to keep their emotions in check and out of the story, but the pressure from rivals, their devotion to their craft, and the horror of the events prove overwhelming.

No distracting personal stories emerge in any detail: one Jewish worker suggests a personal connection with Holocaust victims, and an Algerian-French worker objects to his colleague’s criticism of Arabs (“I’m not talking about your mother” “So just the bad Arabs?”). But overall it steers clear of sob-story talk. The movie is laser-focused on the story at hand. It probably helps that the writer/director, Tim Fehlbaum, is Swiss rather than the usual Hollywood clone.

That said, there’s a sly suggestion of feminism when they ask the interpreter to bring them coffee, only to realize when she’s out that she’s the only one who can understand the German news coming at them. And some characters have clearly not shed their distrust of Germany, forcing Marianne to defend herself and her country; at other times, she views the tragedy as a national humiliation (“Innocent people died in Germany again. We failed. Germany failed”). The film doesn’t show the German police in a positive light: the police were unarmed in order to avoid Nazi imagery, it clearly didn’t prepare for trouble despite the event’s vast scale, it reportedly refused to allow Israeli special forces to help, it bungled the rescue at the airport to fatal result. Germany had presumably hoped to rehabilitate its image like Tokyo did in 1964, but the 1972 games will be forever tainted with this horrific incident and tragic outcome despite the nation’s high hopes. For those of us who were alive at the time, the attack was like 9-11 in that no one could have imagined that such a thing could have happened at such a peaceful sporting event – a horror that is all too imaginable now.

The actors are first rate throughout. Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin and especially an intense John Magaro are ideal as their historical counterparts at ABC, while Leonie Benesch is wonderful as the interpreter/translator, apparently a fictional composite of several real-life characters but essential here. The director ably spliced in actual footage of Jim McKay’s broadcast as well as other images from the day, which gave the entire film a documentary feel. The razor-sharp script moves the story forward with a relentless drive through its horrific conclusion. The director also brilliantly captures the look and feel of the 1970s newsroom with the smoking, land phones, walkie-talkies, letters physically placed on the camera for telops, photo darkrooms and more. They speak of a world where color television was still a luxury for most people; they themselves got much of their news through German radio. The design was letter-perfect.

Numerous critics have rapped the film’s intentional avoidance of politics, particularly given the timing of its release, however incidental, in the midst of the Gaza crisis. They want to see links between the Olympic atrocity and Israel’s actions in Gaza, betraying their own ignorance of the history of the region. Israel had only occupied Gaza for five years as of 1972 after a quarter-century of rule by Egypt (which, for good reasons, had refused Israel’s offer to give the territory back). Israelis at the time would frequently go to Gaza to shop, and Gazan residents, who suffered dire conditions under the Egyptians, were finding work within Israel at much higher wages than they could ever hope for at home, a situation that went on for several years thereafter. Had that continued, Gaza might have been utterly transformed. Unfortunately for Israel and Gaza alike, Black September sought neither compromise nor a two-state solution (nor, it must be said, the welfare of its own people), devoted only to the violent overthrow of the Israeli state and elimination of its Jewish population. Its murderous actions eventually compelled the Israelis to crack down with tough entry restrictions on Gazans, leading to the resentment and ultimate radicalization of the Gazan people. While the movement was thus a success from the warped priorities of the terrorists, it caused only sustained misery and poverty among the very people that the group was supposed to represent. We are still living with the consequences.

Critics charge the film with a bias toward the murdered that, they believe, sheds a bad light on Arabs and elevates Israel. The implication is that the killers should be given their due, which I find repulsive. The barbarous slaughter of athletes at a global event dedicated to peaceful coexistence can’t be justified in any way, and the events are in any case absolutely true – what do they want us to do about it? (Hamas similar attacked a Festival for Peace on October 7, butchering not soldiers or politicians but defenseless citizens, including women, children, non-Israelis, and you-name-it. In that case, the attackers filmed and broadcast the images themselves.) The failure to call terrorism by its name is depraved and disturbing. I don’t see how else the terror can be presented. The critics are blinded by their own bias. I never had any interest in seeing Spielberg’s Munich, which questions the vengeance enacted by the Israelis on the perpetrators over the following years. I have no problem with Israel’s actions in that case at all.

In any event, that isn’t even the point of this film. The event happens to be the terrorist massacre since that’s how history went, but the aim was to show the process by which the information that we receive is gathered, interpreted and conveyed to the world, often in on-the-spot decisions that can determine how the events are forever perceived, as with the image of the hooded terrorist that leads the ABC report. I had accepted all the images and information at the time straightforwardly without thinking about that, so the movie offered a fresh perspective. A terrific film.