An Oscar-nominated thriller rushes past gladiators, Transformers, ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ and Sonic on streaming

The screenplay categories are well and truly the unsung MVPs of the Academy Awards. It’s often the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay races that less popular Oscar contenders have to thank for their well-deserved recognition. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, May December, and Logan are three of the more exciting beneficiaries from these categories.

Of the nominees for this year’s show, September 5 stands out as yet another. Indeed, the Best Original Screenplay nomination for Tim Fehlbaum’s crackling newsroom thriller — penned by Fehlbaum, Mortiz Binder, and Alex David — is the only Oscar nod that this film has received following an impressive presence at the 82nd Golden Globes. It’s no difficult task to see why, as the many denizens of Paramount Plus can apparently attest to.

Per FlixPatrol, September 5 has sprinted to the top of the Paramount Plus film charts in the United States at the time of writing, beating out a plethora of pop culture heavyweights in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator duology (second and ninth place), Transformers One (eighth place), Top Gun: Maverick (sixth place), and a pair of Sonic the Hedgehog adaptations (third place and 10th place).

September 5 stars John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, the head of the ABC Sports control room in Munich, Germany, who is gearing up for a broadcast of the 1972 Summer Olympics. The control room has no way of knowing, of course, that they’re about to be on the front lines of the 1972 Munich massacre — a terrorist attack famed for being the subject of one of the most viewed broadcasts in the history of network television, as well as having been covered by sports journalists.

Image via Paramount Pictures

Those familiar with the Munich massacre of 1972 already know how harrowing of a watch September 5 is. The attack was made by the militant group Black September, who killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team before taking nine more hostage, using them to demand the release of 328 majority Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel. Seventeen people — including all aforementioned Israeli Olympic team members, a West German police officer, and five members of Black September — were killed as a result of the attack.

In September 5, this horrific tragedy contextualizes the ethical fallibility of a newsroom and the people who are operating it. The film paints a picture of a delicate balancing act between keeping the world informed (particularly those who have an emotional stake in the attack, such as the families of the hostages and the Jewish diaspora) and not allowing the attack to veer into sensationalism, lest the focus shift to how well the event serves the newsroom’s ratings rather than how well the newsroom serves the reality of the event.

Indeed, the characters here must reckon with a newsroom president who urges them to emphasize emotions over politics for the sake of a good broadcast, as well as obsessing over getting a good photo or angle of the events while innocent lives are being slaughtered. September 5 asks no easy questions and offers no easy answers, and therefore makes for a vital watch as today’s current events grow more and more disturbing every day.