Icarus
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DIRECTED BY-: Bryan Fogel STARRING-: Bryan Fogel Dave Zabriskie Don Catlin YEAR OF RELEASE-: 2017 PREMISE-: When Bryan sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller. |
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
The director first makes himself the focal point of the film whereas the doctor is presented as someone who just helps him. But then in the second half, he does a full 180 and we get to learn more about the doctor and his struggles. We never go back to what the drugs did to Bryan and his racing.
When the storyline of Bryan testing out the drugs on himself ends, and the interrogation and investigation into the whole program begins, it becomes a lot more interesting and feels less clunky and more coherent. However, for the first hour or so, it felt like the documentary was beating around the bush a lot and wasn't doing much to keep me interested or invested.
It ultimately felt like there was an attempt to mesh together two very separate and different documentaries, which would've worked very well independently, but didn't quite gel together the way the director would've hoped.
In my opinion, it would've been much better if the film was just about the doctor's life and his acts of whistleblowing.
Nevertheless, the director gets his point across in the later half of the documentary pretty effectively. It did make me feel for the doctor and I actually got teary eyed just thinking about the hardships he's had to endure in his life.
I also really enjoyed the occasional parallels to George Orwell's '1984'.
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