Olympia

I’ve been putting this off for a while. I can quite easily sit down any time and watch a long film, or a documentary, a film about sport (not massively into sport), a very old film or a foreign film, but an old (1938), long (3 ½ hours) documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics? That’s a tough sell. I mean, I don’t care about next year’s Olympics, when some of the events will be taking place not far from where I’m typing, let alone ones that happened almost 75 years ago.

The film is essentially just a retelling of the Olympics, showing the events and then revealing the winner, with occasionally shots of the commentators, crowds or photographers. Some tension is brought around from some of the closer run events, such as the men’s pole vault going on into the night, and there’s a collection of clips of people falling off horses that I felt would have been vastly improved with a Harry Hill voiceover.

Choose life 1/10