An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved and since it sounded like an interesting story, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it turned out to be indeed an incredible story with a huge historical impact, it didn’t turn out to be an incredible movie, I’m afraid. Eventually, it seems that Stephen Hopkins, a director with a rather patchy track-record, was not really up to the task and you can only wonder what a great director could have done with such great material. The main issue was that there was just so much going on, so many characters involved and so many plot-lines that a TV-miniseries might have been a better format after all. Still, I wonder if it was really necessary to spend some time on Jesse Owens’s private life when there was already so many things going on which seemed to be so much more important. Anyway, the most interesting thing was the fact that Jesse Owens (and by extension, the US Olympic Team) defied the Nazis by showing that blacks were not inferior to their Aryan race while Owens and the whole black people in general was vastly discriminated in their home country. In the same way, Leni Riefenstahl managed to deliver an impressive movie thanks to Goebbels’s support but even though she saw her work as a piece of Art, it became also the most famous propaganda picture ever produced. These were a few fascinating elements that were displayed in this movie but these ideas were barely developed at all and the end-result was therefore never really fulfilling. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a really strong story and I think it is worth a look, even if it could have been so much better.