#18 — Pelé: Birth of a Legend (movie)

Just a bit late to the football party

The movie that tells the legend of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, or Pelé as many know him as, the youngest world cup player, the Athlete of the 20th Century, three time World Cup winner, the national treasure of Brazil.

As many may know, the recent World Cup ended, with Argentina winning. As a child of Asian heritage, my family never watched any sports, or TV, in that matter. Naturally I knew less about sports teams and only so much as a few great players, but everyone, literally everyone, was talking about the World Cup, so naturally I also had to get a little intrigued. There can’t be a better time to learn about one of the greatest football players. (my friend insisted it’s football not soccer so yea)

The movie is sort of a documentary, but with really engaging and colorful story telling. I’m not the greatest at analyzing plot and rhetoric and such, yet, but even I noticed some flaws, or places that could’ve been improved to improve the film.

This is sort of a pet peeve of mine, but I still stand by my opinion that documentaries, especially historical or biographical ones, should always, only show accurate events that actually happened, or at least contain a disclaimer as so the audience wouldn’t be confused or be blindly believing in misinformation.

The movie implied that Pelé’s training was all with his dad on his job as a janitor, which is not true (He received professional training), and you can feel that the part where his friend dies from a mudslide was filmed and scripted pretty lazily (in fact it might just be a made internal conflict for the main character, but I couldn’t find any info).

Since the movie was named Pelé, I feel it should have accurate information as a biographical documentary, but it added it’s own conflicts and twists to create a more engaging plot (there’s a reason most documentaries are boring), making more money at the cost of authenticity.

There’s another documentary about Pelé called Pelé Forever, but I haven’t watched it. I assume it might be more accurate than this version.

P.S. Shortly after I wrote this I heard about Pelé’s passing. Rest in peace Legend.