Icarus (2017)
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Icarus Movie Review
Icarus is a 2017 documentary film directed by Bryan Fogel. It is a solid, but deeply flawed film which didn’t deserve its Oscar in my opinion.
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“Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’
involves the use of doublethink.
I was doing in parallel two things which cancelled out
each other and being fully contradictory.
Doping and anti-doping“
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The film explores doping and it particularly is concerned with the Russian doping scandal. Now the film obviously deals with a very important subject matter which is also very difficult to assess. It is obvious that the film is one-sided and an attempt to blame only Russia when literally every country is to blame in at least some capacity. However, I did not find the film as Russophobic as it could have been and this is a very difficult subject matter so I am not going to blame the film for spreading potential hate as I do find its intentions to be positive.
What I am going to comment upon is the film’s own technical problems and its own negatives as well as positives. Icarus is basically two movies put together into one incoherent whole. It is obvious that the filmmakers had two fascinating stories here and they should have made two movies out of them, but by mixing them into one, the end result felt very incoherent and uneven.
The first movie we have here is the doping part which is the entire first half where the director himself tries to do that and see the benefits and the potential side effects. I liked that approach quite a bit. The film is naturally very reminiscent of ‘Citizenfour’ in following whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov and is thus not particularly original. However, I liked that he was humanized and he definitely is the driving force of this film and its most interesting part.
The other movie we have here is the second half which is basically a geopolitical thriller. That part I did not like as it was obviously anti-Russian and it took too much time from the actual issue. It was politicized when the film never really cared to explore doping itself all too much and the causes of why sportsmen would even do that.
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Icarus is definitely very well made. It is not well directed by Bryan Fogel as he had too much information to cover and he didn’t do a good job making a cohesive film out of it all. The pacing is problematic is well. But the movie is very well shot with good conversations, dialogue and quotes and overall it was professionally done albeit overlong and messy in approach itself.
Icarus is basically two movies put together into one incoherent, messy film. The first one concerns doping in a much more personal and interesting manner. It was influenced by ‘Citizenfour’ in its approach. The second one is a much less interesting, more typical geopolitical thriller. The film is well made and definitely important, but very uneven in pacing and structure and thus it did not deserve its Oscar at all.
