Dutch game studio StickyLock will unveil the upcoming free-to-play multiplayer shooter Histera at Steam Next Fest next week.
Taika Waititi’s soccer drama Next Goal Wins shoots for thrills and fails to score
13.09.2023 - 16:45 / polygon.com / Taika Waititi / Michael Fassbender
This review of Next Goal Wins comes from the film’s premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be released in November.
Sports dramas are a surefire way to please a crowd. There are few things as primed for comfort viewing, excitement, and last-minute twists as a movie or TV show revolving around a sport. The whole genre is built around the opportunity for rousing speeches, intense montages, feats of athleticism, and cathartic triumph. And sports are cross-cultural enough to offer some universal storytelling beats while staying distinctive for every community and every sport. It’s as true for the story of women’s baseball in A League of Their Own as it is for the high school volleyball anime Haikyu!!, with its exhilarating microcosm of friendship and perseverance.
Enter Thor: Ragnarok director and Our Flag Means Death star Taika Waititi, known for his crowd-pleasing comedies where lovable misfit characters endure hardships with a quirky sense of humor. Waititi’s long-awaited soccer movie Next Goal Wins, a time capsule buried pre-COVID (it wrapped production in January 2020), includes every beat of a standard underdog sports story, told with Waititi’s signature New Zealand style of humor. It features zero surprises, but the jokes mostly land, and the characters are charming. The problem is that the film never really conveys any of the reasons people care about soccer.
The story follows the mostly true story of the American Samoa football team, record-holders for one of the worst soccer losses in history. In the qualifiers for the 2002 World Cup, they lost to Australia 31-0. Then they attempted a comeback under Dutch American coach Thomas Rongen (played in this movie by Michael Fassbender, who can’t seem to keep up with the script’s comedic rhythm).
In Waititi’s version of the story, all of American Samoa hopes and prays for the day when their team can win — or at least score a single goal, which they have never done. (That’s the first of many changes Waititi and co-writer Iain Morris bring to the team’s actual history.) The fans are used to the mixture of hope and despair involved in rooting for a team and watching them lose again and again. That’s the most relatable part of the movie. The script touches on World Cup qualifications; the intricate, complicated, and often dumb FIFA rules for each continent; and the historic rivalries between nations. But most of all, it’s deprecatingly funny about the sensation of knowing your home team sucks, but rooting for it, and hoping the next game will be different.
So it’s too bad the film mostly shoves that idea aside. There’s some on-screen play, and a few clever jokes about the qualification system. (American Samoa doesn’t even
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