Paul Reppucci

If you haven't read the book, it's a decent movie but anyone who did read will be disappointed with the movie and lack of the back stories. How could you not be? The book just had so much more detail and went into great depths about Joe's past, his family life, the depression, the various ways he had to make ends meet, the craftmanship of boat building, the science of rowing and the role each rower/position fulfills, the Nazi Germany build-up, the German propaganda campaigns, the rowing rivalries between California and Washington and then East Coast vs. West Coast. Of course the movie can't detail all of these but it skips or only touches upon most of these which really enhance the underdog theme of the story. I have recently seen a couple of 3+ hour movies that should have been shorter (Oppenheimer and Killers of Flower Moon both come to mind) but this movie could have easily justified 3+ hours of film time. Such a shame that they didn't develop the other rowers characters at all with the exception of the stroke Don Hume and the coxswain Bobby Moch. All the other rowers were skipped. They also didn't even mention that they all tried out as Freshman initially and rowed for 2 years with a mix of same/different rowers before they eventually settled on the final crew in their Junior year and all this stuff in the book happened. They totally skipped all that.