September 5 (2024)

Whatever the political viewpoint of this film actually is in relation to October 7, never forget that it's a movie where the token Frenchman is called 'Frenchie' and he wears a turtleneck and is fussy about food.

Indeed, September 5 is a frustrating and overly serious film that purports to dramatise the Big Ideas and ask the Big Questions of journalism. But it not only undermines itself at every turn whilst hiding its prurience in terrorism behind the moral cover of Entnazifizierung it contains stereotypes ranging from unserious to offensive whilst smuggling in its own view on German-Israel relations.

Despite that, many have credulously labelled this film 'apolitical'... as if there could be anything 'political' than spending 2023 and 2024 financing, producing and directing a film chiefly concerned with the plight of Israeli hostages. And to title that film in a way that evokes both 9/11 and, of course, October 7. And then to put into that film, for no obvious narrative purpose, a sequence where their faces are enlarged and laid on a grid, a layout clearly designed to evoke contemporary murals of hostages held in Gaza. The flipside of this is that the film repeatedly makes a weird fetish out of Jewishness that was more than a little disturbing to this viewer. Did we really need "shalom" to be translated, for example? Or for that interview with the Jewish weightlifter to be played three or even four times? What's more, the smarmy "we're just professionals, doin' our job" tone that the film champions is obviously a political affect as well, one that might be distantly familiar to anyone who has watched The West Wing. And, of course, the less we linger on the film's opaque depictions of "the Arabs" the better.

Yet one thread that becomes increasingly apparent as you go through the film is that the team at ABC do little, if any, original reporting of their own. Whilst it is true that they get a bunch of grainy (and misleading) footage at the airport, all of their actual "confirmations" come from other news sources such as the Delphic wire services or Germany's own ZDF — a state-funded broadcaster that obviously never has to consider cutting to an ad break. It felt like the inverse of that joke from Goldeneye (1995), where M chides Bond: "Unlike the America government, we prefer not to get our bad news from CNN." ABC doesn't even make moral decisions about what to broadcast, for they offload their pseudo-agonising decision to call them "terrorists" or not onto ZDF as well. (Hey, if the entire concept of a state broadcaster is so heinously bad, why are you trusting them to dictate your facts and your principles?)

Not only were ABC useless, though, they were often wrong. Badly wrong. And my reference to The West Wing is equally apposite here as well, as September 5 attempts to convey a personal torment that they feel when they are wrong, rather than any kind of professional embarrassment — at the high point of the film, it turns out that they have made a "bad call" that actually turns out to be completely wrong and they make a histrionical display of their 'betrayal' of the viewers trust. "This is a catastrophe," one of them says. Gimme a freakin' break.

What's perhaps worse, however, is that the film doesn't seem to realise that ABC's presence was almost completely counterproductive here. The team recklessly points a live camera at the terrorist's redoubt, botching any potential chance of police action. (Given that everyone was murdered in the end, it's illogical to argue that it would have been botched anyway.) Also completely unexplored by this film is that by turning the terrorists into stars in front of a billion people on TV, this small bunch of arrogant sports reporters likely encouraged countless future acts of terrorism.. and, therefore, the deaths of 1000s of civilians throughout the world. Good job, boys, but I guess at least Kodak sold a bunch of cameras.

We are therefore forced to look elsewhere for a of this film. One goal of the film might have been to scold the 1970s-era German Government for its lack of perceived vigour and seriousness in resolving the crisis. What I mean here is that, by showing what a 'bad' German government did back then (e.g. by letting the games continue, or in a more pointed example, not letting the IDF special forces take over etc.), the film is therefore approving of the stance that modern German state would (or even are) taking re. German-Israeli relations, the policing of marches and the scope of public opinion. Indeed, the token German (arrogantly, ABC has no actual translators on staff despite being stationed Germany; Leonie Benesch's character is elevated from an lowly editing suite) must represent that famously easy-to-shorthand sociopolitical concept of 'women' and 'feminism', a smush of Gen Z and misunderstood Millennial sensibilities, and didactically put forward a conception for Germany's national project post-Willie Brandt. For anyone who has read anything about the strange turn in German political culture surrounding Israel after October 7, this will all raise an eyebrow or two. In the decades to come September 5 will be seen as part of a broader turn, but its lack of artistic merit and cultural punch will mean that it will be seen as as symptom, not a cause.

September 5 invokes Arab identity and the transference of guilt from the Germans to the Arabs but is uninterested in actually exploring what that materially means, which may help to keep the gears turning smoothly but is politically unserious. And it is, no doubt, purposeful. As Sarsgaard’s Roone off-handedly remarks early in the film about the decision to have McKay ask Mark Spitz, the legendary swimmer and a Jew, about the Holocaust, “it’s not about politics; it’s about emotions.” Someone should tell the filmmakers that emotions are highly political too.

— Greg Nussen (Slant Magazine)