Not as much a "miracle" as it appears; good movie nonetheless

Rating: 8/10 (30 August 2005)

We've all heard the story: a group of rag-tag college kids bands together, gets in the best shape of their lives, plays as a team while being coached by a genius, and sucker-punches a vastly superior Soviet team that had won dozens of games in a row and routed them 10-3 in an exhibition prior to the Olympics (no doubt Brooks wanted it that way so they'd be motivated for the real games and maybe lull the Soviets into a false sense of security).
The movie is well done, but it ignores what really happened: a group of future NHL players took advantage of their youth to get themselves into superior condition to an aging Soviet team that was ripe for an upset, on American home ice, nonetheless. For example, Ken Morrow, who played for the NY Islanders' four Stanley Cup winning teams from 1980-1984, had been drafted by the Islanders in 1976 but played in college for four years. Mark Pavelich wound up with the Rangers, as did Dave Silk and several other players, including Mark Johnson. Oddly, Jim Craig had a terrible career in the NHL, where his weak play outside the crease was exploited to the point of finishing him. Still, this was a great performance by a great team that was captured in what was almost a great film (a great film would have spent more time deconstructing the hidden talent this team had). It should also be noted that Herb Brooks coached the NY Rangers in the early 1980s, and never came close to defeating the Islanders, so either he wasn't as much a factor as we thought, or the 1980 Islanders were superior to the Soviets.
The movie begins with a "retrospective" of America's string of humiliation in the 1970s: the oil embargo and gas lines, the hostage crisis, "Russians in Afghanistan," and the general "malaise" that was prevalent the US at that time. It also portrays the desperate state of US Hockey on the international stage, as no one expected anything from the 1980 team, except maybe winning a few games in the early rounds and avoiding humiliation. Herb Brooks is hired to coach the team, and immediately becomes its dictator, refusing input from the people who hired him and saying simply, "You hired me to do a job, and I'm trying to do it." That was easily the best line of the movie.
Brooks is shown to be a brutal taskmaster more typically associated with Soviet than American hockey. He believed that to beat the Russians, the Americans would have to train like them and even surpass them. Just as Bobby Fischer showed that motivated Americans can defeat the "Russian system" in chess, Brooks applies a Fischer-like work ethic to mold his team into an international hockey force, having chosen his players based on what they could do on their best day rather than their average or worst, and then doing everything he could to get them to peak at the right time. He pulls off the mission, as we all know, but the real story is how he does it. To this extent, the movie is one of the best ever done in that it shows how to beat the best at their own game. A nice little foreshadowing occurs when Brooks tells Johnson that "that coast-to-coast stuff won't work against the teams we'll be playing," yet it wound up being what kept Team USA in the game.
This was a story that had to be told, a movie that had to be made, and the job was done well enough to make this movie a must-see.