Should you watch this movie?
Story
During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, an American sports broadcast crew must adapt to cover live Israeli athletes taken hostage by a terrorist group. I’m not going to mark this as a spoiler, because the only spoilers will be about the events of the hostage crisis that you may already know about. Yes. Does Paramount know how to promote this movie? No. This movie is set during the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics, but it’s actually about the ABC sports crew who are suddenly tasked with providing live reporting on the attack.
Unlike other recent movies (ie
We see everything from the crew’s point of view. Late Night With The Devil), this one isn’t presented as found footage, just a dramatization of the events. So the production doesn’t resort to shaky cam, instead using “state of the art” technology available at the time. Most of the action is from the crew behind the scenes, so you don’t know the people or their names. Jim McKay is the main face of the news reporting, and viewers old enough to have watched sports in that era will recognize him. Peter Jennings is on location as the sole news entity rather than a sports reporter, and refreshingly comes across as a dork.
The crew has a lot of difficulty getting the news out
Howard Cosell gives a voiceover report, and that’s the end of the people you’d meet. I want to give credit to the mix of new and archival video and audio. I’m assuming some archival video was used, but it’s absolutely perfect, so I’m not sure (and the credits rolled too quickly). Much of it is due to the technology of the time (which will sound boring if I describe it, but it’s presented in an engaging way). But there are also ethical questions that news crews may not need to discuss. For example: should they broadcast live video from the scene of the attack when that could lead to broadcasting someone’s murder?
That seems unfair to the Germans of the time
The film covers a period of about 24 hours and only tells us what the crew knows. This leaves us with a few uncertainties, most notably: Was it Black September? and what really happened in the fog of war scene at the airport? This last question is somewhat unsettling, as it leaves us with the impression that, once the terrorists and hostages move away from the Olympic village, the German police were, perhaps, less concerned with protecting the hostages. Before the action begins, we get a few introductory scenes to get to know the characters and see how they report on sports. I was surprised to see admissions here of injecting politics into sports broadcasts, both to stoke cold war rivalries and to capitalize on lingering grievances from World War II.
It just works
Once the action began, I was surprised at how often I was moving to the edge of my seat. The film is absolutely fascinating. It works as a time capsule. It works as a behind-the-scenes exposé. It works as a terrorism story.
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