The story of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist massacre – in which 11 Israeli hostages were killed by the Palestinian Black September group, dying along with five of members of the group and one West German police officer – is retold by the Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum as a taut, tense thriller. The film leaves it up to us to make what we will of modern parallels.
The situation is reinvented as a kind of media procedural, shown purely from the viewpoint of ABC TV’s sports division, who from their cramped, claustrophobic gallery found themselves in sole charge of broadcasting the events live to the world. The crew is seen wheeling a cumbersome studio camera in range of the athletes’ village to capture images, quarrelling with other American TV companies about satellite-feed space. They’re under pressure to make unchecked statements to make sure their rivals didn’t get the scoop, making split-second editorial decisions with zero news experience while grimacing at the banks of TV screens like Houston Mission Control watching Apollo 13. And they were only aware too late that they were directly influencing what was happening, on the edge of panic at the responsibility and the sheer postmodern nightmare of what was happening.
