'September 5' Film on 1972 Munich Olympics Captures the Truth about Terrorism

The film “September 5,” which covers the 1972 Summer Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich, has a refreshingly simple — but not simplistic — take: Kidnapping and murdering civilians is bad, and there is no context in which to justify it.  

Swiss-born Tim Fehlbaum, the director, isn’t known for ideology; his previous features were science fiction and horror. It’s the absence of ideology here that works. We see the Munich terror attack unfold through the eyes of journalists — people who are competent at their job, covering the pre-attack Games, but who aren’t foreign-policy “experts.”  

So when the team of journalists, guided by rookie producer Geoffrey Mason, hears gunshots from the athletes’ housing compound that September dawn, the reaction is natural, in an era before reporters came to associate global events with terror risk: shock and perplexity. 

When the terrorists reveal themselves as they peer out of the Israeli athletes’ apartment they’ve taken over, the American journalists reflexively see them as bad people. (NYP /VFI News) 

“The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” - Matthew 13:41-43