You may think the Red Army movie is a movie about hockey (it is, after all, about the national Soviet hockey team), but you would be wrong. It is about resilience under adversity, determination, society, and politics. Hockey was the most popular male sport in the Soviet Union and thus played a key role in the Soviet Communist Party strategy to demonstrate the superiority of their political model, but the players also had to deal with a terrible, mean coach supported by the Party after their good one - a genius at strategy - was removed for a trifle, the temptation to defect to America, the Party's insistence that they should turn over most of their wages to their cash-starved country when they played abroad while the Soviet Union began to collapse and the difficulty for those who made the transition to the West to adapt to new ways of playing (read: brute-force playing instead of strategic and dazzling) and American hostility... capped by a transformative decision by the coach of the Detroit Red Wings, Scotty Bowman, to hire all five of the top Russian/ex-Soviet players so that they could play again exactly as they had in the Soviet Union for which they had won two Olympic Gold medals, and thus bringing the Stanley Cup twice to Detroit.
The movie centers around Slava Fetisov, longtime captain of the Soviet team, whose steadfastness in spite of adversity truly inspired me, and four of his teammates, who made one of the most successful teams in hockey history. It is hard to put in words how much I admire Fetisov for the difficult, courageous stances he took throughout his career. After many years abroad, he returned to Russia at the request of the president and is now a successful politician.
I don't know the first thing about hockey, but left the Kendall Cinema inspired by this remarkable team. Amazing.
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