ABC studios sent their sports broadcasting crew under executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) to film the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, with live reporting by Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker). During the Games, the terrorist group Black September took 9 Israeli athletes and two coaches hostage in their Olympic Village hotel room. Arledge seizes the opportunity, refusing to turn coverage over to the ABC News team, and authorizing George Mason (John Magaro), head of the video control room, to use all measures to get the story. Mason scrambles to get Jennings and cameras in place before the police clear the area of journalists, and has their translator (Leonie Benesch) listen to the police scanners.
This is based on real events. My mom remembers seeing it live. It was a major moment in broadcast journalism as the first terrorist hostage-taking shown on live television.
I don't want to knock the movie. It's very well done, it tells an interesting story and does so in an interesting way. (It's also only about 90 minutes, which is refreshing as fuck.) But I do lament the timing of it. It feels really suspect that a film centering on the murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists is coming out while the news is dominated by stories of Israelis systematically starving and murdering Palestinians. I don't think that was the intent of the film-makers. The wiki page states that they spent months going through archival footage and researching. It's not a conspiracy; it's just really shitty timing. Unfortunately, if I've made the connection, I'm betting other people will have as well. And that sucks. The movie doesn't deserve to be tarred with that brush.
It's not up for Editing, which feels like a slight since they did manage to make the archival footage look pretty seamless. I don't think it will win but hopefully the exposure will put it in front of more eyeballs than it would have gotten if Paramount had just dumped it on streaming. Which it's not on yet, by the way, but keep a lookout.
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