Well, two to be precise.

First, we have the process.

September 5 takes place at the Olympics of 1972 when Lasse Viren won gold both in 5k and 10k runs leading him into becoming the Finnish Sportsman of the year. It was also the year when first satellite transmissions happened, so they were able to broadcast the games live in the US. The technology is very far from what it now is as they didn’t have computers to help them, so they need to do everything manually. All of that is interesting. Like when they need slo-mo, someone actually has to stand by the tapes and slow it down with their hands. These are professionals and it is a pleasure to watch them figure things out on the fly (even if they are actors). I for one love it. On the other hand, if the limitations of the technology of the day are not of interest to you, this might not work for you, but gladly…

Secondly, this is the event that brought the word “terrorist” into the English lexicon. It was there before, but this was the time (at least according to the movie) when it was first used in such a public context.

What happened was that a small group of terrorist attacked the Israeli team, killing one and taking nine as hostages. The team covering the Olympics pivot quickly into covering this event instead, which leads to many of the situations above, where they have to figure things out. From this point of view they also have to figure something more consequential out: How do they cover it.

After all, this is completely unprecedented. Sure, some catastrophic situations, like the Hindenberg disaster, had been captured on camera, but not live, so they have to discuss how are they going to approach various situations. Also, these are the sports people. It isn’t like they have done anything like this before, but at the same time they are the right people in the right place, because they are the ones who had to learn to follow quickly moving athletes with their bulky equipment.

They do manage to cover a lot of points of view in the movie. Like, you do your job and that means that you witness something you don’t want to. What do you do? How do you live with that? Or you gave information to the terrorists without meaning to. Who’s fault is that? The satellite has limited capacity, so how do you make sure you have that when others have rights to it as well?

Things do move very quickly and while I do prefer movies that don’t overstay their welcome, I do feel the movie is too hectic. There must have been lulls in the action when people just wait anxiously for something to happen, but that doesn’t get across at all. I might be alone wishing for this, though.

Overall, it is definitely an interesting movie about an event that might be historically pivotal in ways we might not even realize quite yet, although apparently it does come up in secondary school curricula in some countries. This opened a whole new way of doing politics, both in the sense that terrorism will get you visibility, but also as terrorism did become a household concept, you could also use it to scare people.

Of course, this is politically topical right now. It does try to toe the line a little bit, not condemning Arabic people in general, but instead focusing on the actual culprits. They do bring up various historical tensions between peoples as we have a German, a Frenchman, who’s mother is Algerian and a Jew in the crew. There’s also some misogyny in the film (not by the film), which does get handled pretty well, but it also does feel a little forced and unnecessary (even though I don’t want to necessarily whitewash the misogyny of the era either).

I don’t know how to feel about the situation in Gaza right now and it’s take on that. I am very much anti-genocide and you could see this either as a pro-Israel take or a take on how violence will beget violence.

It is also a take on our social media landscape as we are still learning how to live in this new situation. Similar problems exist, but at a much bigger scale as anyone can report on anything with any information available to them or not available to them.

One final thing: Weirdly, the best character in the movie is only seen a couple of times, in both cases shot on a early 70s TV camera from a 100 yards away. We never hear her directly, because there is no sound. I’m talking about a hostage negotiator, who has a very different approach to her work than what you might expect as she tries to form a rapport with the terrorists. I guess it’s good we don’t see her more as she would have stolen the show. Maybe a movie about her?