Word
Wars (*)
review by Jon
Waterman
This documentary chronicles the journey of four individuals
as they travel from city to city competing in various Scrabble
tournaments. They’ve formed a little community within
the circuit and everyone knows who the best players are. Tensions
run high and placing fake words on the board will not be tolerated.
As they approach the national championship, the cramming and
mental stress begin to take their toll. Will one of these eccentric
competitors have what it takes to overcome it all, focus on
creating the best words available from all their tiles, and
win the whole shebang?
Have you ever wondered what kind of person would enter a Scrabble
tournament? Do you think you’re up to the challenge and
have the word skills to pay the bills? If so then this just
may be the movie for you. It may also make you never want to
wonder things like that ever again. I can tell you right now
that the answer to the second question is a resounding “no.” Unless
you’re willing to essentially memorize the dictionary
(just the words, definitions are meaningless in this game)
and study different combinations of letters, as well as play
the game for hours upon hours each day, then maybe you should
just play your little cousin if you want to feel better about
yourself.
As for that first question, well you probably think you want
to know, but once you actually meet these people within the
confines of the movie…. It’s not that they’re
uninteresting characters, it’s that they are just that:
characters. I’m not saying that they ham it up for the
camera, but never do you get the impression that they intend
to lead any sort of typical life. There’s not much there
to relate to. They are extremely obsessed with the board game
and with being the best player and are perfectly okay with
Scrabble being the be all and end all of their existence. It
feels like we’re watching crack addicts and the filmmakers
are perpetuating it and providing them fixes solely for the
purported entertainment value of the documentary. Whereas “Spellbound” was
a great sociological study on a different segment of adolescent
life, “Word Wars” simply comes off as a collection
of pathetic (sometimes stereotypical) misfits who have nothing
else going within their lives besides this game.
“Spellbound” also had a better competition going
for it. The film didn’t even attempt to build a sense
of tension. Maybe the structure or format of the competition
doesn’t lend itself to your typical bracket elimination.
We don’t know. They don’t explain to us how the
tourney’s work. They don’t even give us a breakdown
of how the scoring works for anyone who may not be familiar
with the game. You get some status updates and are shown the
final scores of specific games, but never do you really know
exactly what’s going on or how high the stakes are. As
a result, the last match plays out like a slightly extended
regular tournament game with equally anticlimactic results.
It appears that even the organizers of the event don’t
want to make a spectacle of it. It’s sad really.
There’s just nothing to get excited about throughout
the entire documentary. This isn’t the best recruiting
tool for Scrabble, considering it makes its players look like
low-life losers. I didn’t care about a single person
portrayed. If they really wanted to focus on interesting people,
the whole doc should have been about the older people playing
in the park. The competition was boring and drawn out. Their
graphics were shoddy and mostly unrelated to the game they’re
showing. What was with the “Matrix”-inspired background
behind the text overlays? Nothing really came together. The
tiles never really fall in the right places for this movie.
Far from a bingo, I’d like to challenge this documentary.
I think they’re trying to pass off a phony.
respond to jon@filmbrats.com
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