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Friday Night Lights (2004)

You could put the effort required to get to know a professional football team, its players, coaches, and rivals... or get the whole package in a lean 118 minutes by watching Friday Night Lights. It's undoubtedly the best football movie I've ever seen and among the top sports films.

Set in 1988, the Permia High School Panthers are an ordinary team in an atypical town. Odessa lives and breathes football. Everyone goes to the game and it’s the only thing happening Friday night. Tremendous weight is placed on the young players' shoulders as the new season begins.

The sport in this film sucked me in like no other season - real or fictional - ever has. The games are like action sequences packed with a wide spectrum of emotions. There’s fear when the Panthers are running behind on points. There’s hope as they put together their strategies. There’s drama when a play goes wrong and they face the repercussions off the field. You even get the same kind of excitement contained in bone-crunching martial arts sequences when the players tackle, run, and throw. The stunts in this movie are incredible and they’re all the more impactful because you care about who's on the field.

The games will have your knuckles so tight they turn white but they wouldn't exist without the players. You don’t follow everyone on the team but it doesn't matter. Those you see are the ones you'd choose to. In turn, they contribute to the film's main character: the Panthers team. These children - they're not even out of high school - live in a town where losing a game is as bad as being convicted of a crime. If there’s tension between you and your father, it gets worse when you fumble the ball. If you couldn’t get people to like you when you were just an ok player, forget about making new friends when you just cost your team the game. When they hear “This is going to be the best year of your life, it’s all downhill from now” it gets you thinking not only about their mental state but about the town and the country as a whole. Are we all taking a game too seriously?

As the story explores the pressures put on the Panthers, you're filled with outrage. It makes you want to see them win as bad as everyone else but for different reasons. This town breaks your heart. This atmosphere is poisonous. These 17-year-old's whole lives are football and they’re not even getting paid for it. It carefully manages to both celebrate the sport and condemn those who put too much emphasis on it. You go back-and-forth between wanting to get up and cheer or sit down quietly and reflect upon the emotions on display.

Friday Night Lights contains drama that pulls you to both edges of the emotional spectrum. The performances are solid, the characters complex, and captivating. The games are better shot than any real event could ever be, which makes it exciting on a whole other level. The players, their relationship with the sport, and the town who worship it makes it feels more down-to-earth and unpredictable than if the typical drama you see in sports films were piled on top. It really feels like watching an entire season of the sport within the span of a single movie. It filled me with the kinds of emotion I'm not used to feeling in a sport and I can’t recommend it enough. (Full-screen version on DVD, March 31, 2015)