Well-acted and tight, maybe to a fault, the docudrama “September 5” revisits the 1972 Olympics massacre in Munich in which 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team died, along with five members of the Palestinian terrorist faction known as Black September and a West German policeman. It’s an analog reminder of sadly ever-contemporary Israeli-Palestinian tensions, now edging into a hopeful ceasefire phase. It’s also a reminder of TV news when one station could dominate coverage of an international incident.

The film does this from its chosen perspective of the ABC-TV sports crew, headed up by Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard). His crew was required, abruptly, to report on an unfolding crisis instead of what the world thought it would be watching. An estimated 900 million viewers tuned in.

What the world saw on air, and what Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum give us, came from 22 hours of nervy decisions and tense debates off-camera. “September 5” simplifies out of necessity; it’s less than 90 minutes long, excluding its opening and closing credits. It refuses its real-life subjects a single moment that is not on point, or that does not discreetly ratchet up momentum.

John Magaro, who has yet to give a false performance on screen, is the relative newbie Geoffrey Mason. Ben Chaplin portrays producer Marvin Bader, frequently at odds with both the initially cautious Mason and the never-doubtful Arledge. As a fictionalized composite character of their German translator, Leonie Benesch uses every ounce of her talent and instinct to make a real human being out of someone designed by Fehlbaum and co-writer Moritz S. Binder as an emblem of stricken German conscience. A savior on the fly, helping her often condescending male colleagues, she’s crestfallen at her country’s appalling security measures around the Olympic Village.

The film has little time for depth; it’s more about the tumult as it happens, full of intriguing details about what it took to invent an ad hoc live-transmission system, what it took for Arledge to negotiate with CBS for use of a single satellite feed, what it took to get the story, only to make a daring and terribly inaccurate judgment call based on optimistic reports of the hostages being freed at the airport. At its best, “September 5” shows us the valor, the arrogance (Benjamin Walker is anchor Peter Jennings, murmuring faux poetics while describing a masked terrorist as “brandishing a submachine gun like a threat”) and the inarguable shortcomings. These were exhausted, competitive people in utterly foreign territory.

What’s missing, even at its trim, tidy run time, is the sort of glancing realism and true nuance of a Paul Greengrass docudrama such as “Bloody Sunday.” What’s there, though, is enough for a consistently absorbing version of what the media did right and what it did wrong, at a time and circumstance when “the media” was one station, with a few dozen human beings under pressure and amid geopolitical stakes they could barely fathom. “September 5,” which probably should’ve been a four-hour limited series, doesn’t attempt to fathom those stakes, either. It takes a different route, and as a procedural, it works.

———

'SEPTEMBER 5'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:35

How to watch: Now in theaters

———

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.