Review: Clint Eastwood's INVICTUS
Invictus is yet another great film from director Clint Eastwood. He’s really on a roll with the films he has been making recently! It just seems like this guy can't loose and make a bad movie. He's made some amazing films and Invictus is definitely his most inspiring and influential film yet.
Invictus tells the inspiring true story newly elected Nelson Mandela and how he joined forces with the captain of South Africa's rugby team to help unite their country. President Mandela knows his nation remains racially and economically divided in the wake of racial segregation. Believing he can bring his people together through the universal language of sport, Mandela rallies South Africa's rugby team as they make their historic run to the 1995 Rugby World Cup Championship match.
I loved that this wasn’t a full-on biopic of Nelson Mandela’s life. The story surrounds a major single event in his life and they focus on it. There are so many biopics that get made where the filmmakers try to tell the full life story of one man in just two hours, and it just doesn’t really work. They become disjointed, messy, and uninteresting. This film was a solid story focused on one big part of Mandela's life, and you still got everything you needed to know about him and what he stood for.
The movie was incredibly well made and the acting was superb. Clint Eastwood knows movies, and he's got mad story telling skills. I will say the biggest problem I found with the film was one piece of music called Colorblind -- it was so distracting during the moment that it played. I was completely pulled out of the movie. Why that song was thrown in, I have no idea, but putting it in was the worst possible decision for this movie. But don’t let it stop you from watching it, the rest of the movie was excellent.
Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon both gave fantastic performances. I don’t know how you can’t watch this movie and not like these characters, and what they stand for.
I love the sport of Rugby, and I enjoyed the fact that this story was based around that sport. The sport scenes in the film were incredible. If you don’t know much about the sport, this film does a good job showing you how it’s played and decently portrayed the brutality of the sport, proving that this is one of the most bad-ass sports ever invented.
The scenes involving the sport being played in a stadium are some of the most epic sports scenes I have seen. The crowds are huge and there was no CGI used in creating these crowds, and that my friends made a huge difference. One of the things that the GeekTyrant crew and I discussed after the film was the fact that these Rugby sports scenes seemed so much more bigger and epic than the stadium scenes in most sports films and even epics like Gladiator. Using a real crowd of people makes a huge difference. Don’t believe me? Then watch this movie.
Invictus was a fantastic sports film, one that carried a great message. It was a very positive and uplifting film that leaves you with a sense of hope and happiness when you leave the theater. In a world were we are surrounded by a lot of negativity, with a decent amount of films with downer endings, seeing a movie like Invictus was a nice change of pace. Movies don’t have to be depressing to be good.
There are a decent amount of individuals, including my peers that didn’t give Invictus good feedback. Many of them didn’t seem to like it, but I absolutely loved it. The movie was a fantastically made sports film that is full of positivity.
In my eyes Invictus is a near perfect film. Had Eastwood made different musical choices it would have been a much more solid film, but I still highly recommend you go out and see this movie in the theater when you get a chance. You’ve got to see these Rugby game sequences on the big screen! I doubt they will have the same inpact on DVD. I loved this story, and I think you will as well.
If you saw the movie, please tell me what you thought of it!