Friday Night Lights - Where success really lies

I love football movies. Quite funny, since I don't really care to watch football games themselves. But something about the stories and dreams that are accompanied in the movies really stand out to me.

Friday Night Lights is definitely the best football movie I've ever seen. This is because it does not focus on the sports game itself; it more so focuses underneath that, into the lives of the characters, and exactly what they go through on a day-to-day basis to try and accomplish their dream - to escape a tiny, monotonous world.

PLOT

In Odessa, Texas, 1988, football is the axis upon which everyone's world revolves around. Who cares if the game is brought by a high school team, particularly the Permian High Panthers?

On the surface, these boys seem like grown men as they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders - to win state championship.

While the season starts off well, with star running back and best player Booby Miles (Derek Luke - Antwone Fisher, Spartan) making touchdown after touchdown, good things soon come to an end when he endures a serious knee injury that keeps him from playing.

Things begin to be quite a struggle from there, as the team doesn't seem to be able to do as good without Booby. The pressure they go through everyday, handed out by everyone from peers to parents, really rides on the viewer as if we are the ones that feel we have to win that state championship.

However, it just might be coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton - Bandits, Monster's Ball, Bad Santa) that feels the most pressure of all, and also the one that contains it the best. He has his whole family to think of, and losing the state championship may mean having to move again.

Yet he stands to teach his team that it isn't only about one player that they have lost - it's about the entire team that they still have, and they must not lose hope to win.

ANALYSIS

Again, it's underneath the surface of the football game that the story of this movie really lies. It's in the lives of each person, and everything they have to go through, on top of their own dreams of winning state championship.

The biggest aspect in this movie is the pressure - most of these boys grew up being wrongly taught that there was only one way out of that desolate town, and that one way was through a football scholarship. All other potential each individual may have had was pushed aside, as parents pushed their sons to excel in football, and taught them that winning was everything.

An abusive father who had helped to win the state championship when he was younger now lays the weight on his own son.

An ill mother who only wants the best for her son helps him study his plays, even though he's secretly confused about what he wants because he doesn't want to leave his mother behind all alone.

And the third-string running back, also the smallest player, may have never gotten a shot at bringing home several touchdowns if Booby Miles had never had to leave the game.

Although these kids were raised in believing that winning is everything, in the end it's Gaines who teaches them that winning is never verified by a scoreboard, but rather in honesty, in being true to yourself, and knowing you did everything you could to accomplish your dream.

That's where success really lies.