Friday Night Lights is a well-regarded movie, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. The movie follows a high school team from Odessa, Texas in 1988 who is prime position to win the state championship in football that year, and the adversity they went through along the way. The movie overall was solid, nothing innovative or special just a solid sports movie which in of itself makes it one of the better sports movies of all time which isn’t saying much. It was safe in its presentation of the material, but often I found myself desiring more from the movie.

The movie was very frustrating on many fronts, leaving a lot of undeveloped plot arcs, and just not taking some of the more interesting plot points further. One that comes to mind is the development of the character James “Boobie” Miles. Here is a boy that has such a promising future, an excellent athlete, one of the best in Texas, a future football scholarship to a D1 school, and it all gets derailed by a knee injury. This has the potential to be a driving point for the movie, an arc that can be focused on and have many complex themes that can add depth to the movie. Instead they threw the character arc to the wayside, and it was never really visited again outside of using it as an inspirational piece for the football team as they continue with their season. There are a few of these storylines that are tossed to the side, and these arcs would add the depth that the movie is lacking. This is a byproduct of the movies structure. Their entire season is squished into a two-hour runtime, and the final product feels fast paced and rushed. While the face paced nature is not all bad, more action and excitement are a few positives, the emotional depth in the plot is really lost. There is simply no screen time for those lines to develop so no real relationships with the characters or even the team can be made with the audience, so the emotional ending is a big miss in terms of what it set out to accomplish. Overall it was a solid movie, but it could have been a truly special movie if there was more focus on the plot arcs and characters they left undeveloped.