Invictus may be a terrific movie about racial reconciliation in South Africa. It may be a terrific movie about rugby. This trailer makes it look like neither.
There's no sense of what kind of odds the rugby team faces. There's no particular sense of how the rugby team wins black supporters as well as white ones. The idea that sport does what Truth and Reconciliation still hasn't, entirely, is insulting and absurd. I was talking to some folks last night about how Denzel Washington, and later Philip Seymour Hoffman, set the standards for biopics by fully inhabiting Malcolm X and and Truman Capote. The problem is that the physical and vocal impersonations alone do not a movie make.