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Murderball (Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin) is about some of the members of the USA paraplegic rugby team as they compete their way into the 2004 Paralympic Games. We get some great footage of the men playing the game and talking about themselves. It was quite moving at certain points, especially as we watch some of the men (not all involved in the sport) come to terms with their new (or not so new) realities.

Right after watching it, I wasn’t very satisfied. I felt like it tried to cover too much ground and ended up losing focus. There were a lot of personal moments as well as typical sports-movie moments, which I feel conflicted each other by how much detail they went into. (Should I care about these peoples lives, or about how the team does?) Some of the personal moments went way off the topic of the sport, too, so I was confused as to whether I should be thinking about the individuals or the team.

After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized that the film was using murderball (the original name for the sport) as a platform for presenting these people and their lives to us. I think that the filmmakers wanted to show us certain individuals who are embracing their situations and not feeling that they are unreasonably limited as to what they are capable of doing. Of course, joining a Murderball team is not the ideal thing for every quadriplegic to do… or maybe it is, I don’t know.

I’m not really into sports, but I enjoyed those parts of the film as much as the character ones. I have never seen a sport played more intensely and violently. These guys ram into each other’s custom wheelchairs so hard that they often fly out of them… and they don’t wear helmets! (I can’t remember what they say about that in the film, but I remember that it was funny.)

Watching the characters learn and struggle to do things like button their shirts, cook and drive cars made me feel so grateful for the use of all of my limbs. That sounds dumb, but still, it made me realize how easy it is to take things like the use of my arms and leg for granted. They even had a segment on how they have sex, which addressed some questions that I’m sure all of us had!

The segment that I felt was the most powerful was about a young man named Keith, who became quadriplegic after an accident on his dirt bike. When he was released from the hospital and went to his newly wheelchair-accessible home, he sat there and said, “This sucks.” He said that it was just then sinking in that his entire life had changed. I don’t know if this moment was re-enacted for the camera or actually captured on film as it happened, but it makes you realize that what the murderball team members are doing is truly amazing. He then meets star murderball player Mark Zupan at the hospital (he is doing a presentation about the sport to new quadriplegics) and becomes inspired to relight his extreme sports spark.

Murderball is an honest, intimate and heartfelt documentary into the lives of these men and the people who surround them. It doesn’t try to force us to like them all (which I don’t), or feel sorry for them (which I couldn’t help doing, for some of them). It could easily have been made in such a way that tried to manipulate viewers into feeling pity or sympathy, but it wasn’t; rather, it presents individuals and their unique personal situations, whose common ground revolves around a sport that they love and that is truly their own.